


The Kelpie

by Readingrat



Series: Kelpie AU [1]
Category: House M.D.
Genre: F/M, Friendship/Love, Gen, Hurt/Comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-22
Updated: 2014-03-12
Packaged: 2018-01-15 11:38:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 22
Words: 128,058
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1303537
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Readingrat/pseuds/Readingrat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>House's efforts to banish what happened at the end of Season 7 from his mind are radical, but things don't work out the way he planned them. AU from the last minutes of S7, different spin on the crash, some Huddy, H/W-friendship.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> Length: about 130,000 words  
> Genre: hurt/comfort, angst  
> Rating: teen  
> Characters: House, Cuddy, Wilson, Rachel, Nolan, OCs.  
> Pairings: some House/Cuddy, hint of House/OC  
> Many thanks to Brighid45 for beta-ing this and providing lots of local information.

May, 2011

Cuddy's cell phone had rung a number of times, but she'd ignored all calls from the hospital. Her house and her life were in a shambles - they'd have to thrash it out without her for one evening. It was when the all-too-understanding police officer was interviewing Wilson for his version of the evening's events that an EMT stepped up to her brandishing a pager.

"This yours, ma'am?" he asked. "It's been going off incessantly."

She glanced at it, regretting her inability to blank out the hospital completely. It was Hourani, from surgery. Usually he didn't bother her with inconsequentialities, so her hesitation was of short duration; possibly the hospital would provide a distraction. She pulled out her cell phone and dialled the number on the pager.

"Dr Hourani, what's the problem?"

"Dr Cuddy? I — I thought I'd paged Dr Wilson."

She examined the pager — yes, it was Wilson's. "There's been an accident and he's injured. You'll have to contact his deputy."

"Oh." There's a short silence. "Well, maybe you could ...?"

"I'm busy, actually. Could we get to the point?"

"It's Dr House. He was involved in a car crash — I guess we're talking about the same one, here — and brought into the ER an hour ago; he needs to go into surgery. His leg's a mess."

Damn! She'd forgotten — or chosen to overhear — that Wilson had instructed the ambulance to take House to PPTH rather than to Princeton General, which would have been closer. She should have intervened, but she'd still been too shocked. And Hourani didn't know, _couldn't_ know what had happened this evening.

"So get him into surgery!" she snapped. He was in her hospital now and they'd have to treat him.

"Dr House has extensive fractures in his right leg. The main problem is that the femur is fractured at the site of his muscle infarction. The whole area is an ugly mess, and even if we manage to fix it up — which I doubt — he'll never be able to walk again."

"Why not?"

"With his pain issues and the muscle he's missing, he can't maintain a rigorous PT regimen, and without that he'll never regain use of that leg. The surgery will take hours and he's weak already. There's an acute danger he won't survive it. We should amputate. There's no use in killing him to save a leg that he'll never use again."

"Dr Cuddy?" Someone else was at the telephone now. Cuddy could hear Hourani protesting in the background; apparently he hadn't relinquished the telephone voluntarily. "I'm pretty sure I can save the leg." She recognized Chase's voice now. "He's got some bad fractures there, but it's nothing that can't be fixed."

"And his mobility?"

"He'll manage somehow. Dr Cuddy, you _know_ House. He won't want to lose that leg, not for the world. If he needs to go through PT to regain his mobility he'll do it, no matter how much pain he's in. I can do it. Please, Dr Cuddy! Don't let whatever is between House and yourself —"

Cuddy interrupted him. "Who is the surgeon on duty?"

"Hourani," Chase admitted reluctantly.

"Then give the phone back to Hourani. Now! ... Dr Hourani, ask House what he wants, and then do it."

"He's unconscious."

She'd thought as much. "Well, I'm neither his next of kin nor his medical proxy. You may not be aware of it, but he's married. Find his wife and ask her."

"We've tried. We can't reach her. He needs to go into surgery _now_ ; he's lost a lot of blood."

"You do know that you're entitled to make this decision yourself." Cuddy pointed out.

Hourani was silent. She understood him only too well. This was a medical emergency, and if neither the patient nor the next of kin were in a position to make a decision, it was well within the surgeon's competence to carry out whatever procedure he considered necessary. The only reason Hourani was hesitating was because this was House, the hospital's _enfant terrible_ , who would turn into Shiva the Destroyer when he discovered that the limb he'd fought for, agonized over, and cursed relentlessly, had been removed while he was unconscious and unable to defend it against encroaching surgery. She couldn't blame Hourani for attempting to get out of the line of fire, not after witnessing what House had put her through since the break-up.

Cuddy looked over at Wilson, cradling his arm as he answered the officer's questions, oblivious of the weighty decision being felled within a few yards' distance. He looked young, shocked, confused. She glanced at Julia, seated on the neighbour's stoop, her husband's arm wrapped around her shoulder, her face tear-streaked and fearful. She looked back at her house, dust still billowing from the gap in the wall, construction workers cordoning off the area around the hole and nailing a plywood board over it.

He'd already tried to kill her and her family. How much worse could it get? Not much, she figured. Better her than Hourani — they really didn't need House running a vendetta against _two_ people at the hospital.

"Amputate," she said to Hourani. "I authorise the procedure and I'll take the responsibility for it."


	2. An Unexpected Party

_April 2015_

The scent of a woman's shampoo gets him sacked this time. Not a perfume, no. A mundane shampoo, a delicate whiff of vanilla and orange that triggers some primeval response in that part of his brain that isn't thoroughly fried and gets him moving on auto-pilot, a slave to subconscious memories that he can't access and to his insatiable curiosity. Admittedly the woman in question happens to tick most of his boxes (brunette, slim, sexy, and confident), but considered objectively she isn't worth the hassle of looking for a new job — which is where this will end.

Luckily, he doesn't know this yet.

All he's aware of when he first catches sight of her is that twinge of appreciation that a pair of well-toned legs in high heels always arouses in him, especially when they are attached to a shapely body. She for her part doesn't notice him at all, absorbed in reading a sheaf of notes while carrying on a conversation on the Smartphone that's lodged between her raised shoulder and ear. When she speaks her voice, low and husky, ticks another of his boxes. He moves to the back of the lift as she enters it, used to being overlooked by hotel guests and perfectly content to get a good view of her well-rounded backside as she turns to face the doors that are closing behind her.

She has an unmistakeable American accent. "Okay, Shannon, I'll talk to Ed about it. But honestly, what do you expect if you treat your fellows like privileged guests instead of employees? In the future, make sure that they know they'll end up as fish fodder in the Raritan if they sneak off to other departments behind your back."

She throws back her head in irritation as she ends the call and scrolls down her contacts until she finds the one she's looking for. As she waits for the other end to take the call, the phone once more jammed to her ear, she digs in her bag for a pen with which she marks passages on the papers she's holding. He can't help grinning at such obsessive multi-tasking.

"Hello, Ed? Yes, it's me. ... Yes, I  _know_  what time it is at your end. I just got a call from Shannon. She says you enticed one of her fellows away from her into cardiology. ... It's my business because I'm  _making_  it my business. … Listen, Ed, I know what you're up to: you let other departments hire fellows, you observe them for a few months, and then you swoop in and cherry-pick the best. Saves you the bother of interviews, of first hiring and then firing mediocre fellows, and it makes your personnel budget look really good. It's a free trial period without any of the risks and unpleasantness. It's Got To Stop! ... Yes, I know I'm not the dean, but in two years, when Rosenbaum retires, I will be. ... You wanna bet?"

She tosses her dark, wavy hair and gives a low laugh that goes straight to his groin. "Ed, you know I could classify that last comment as sexual harassment, but I'll take it as a compliment."

She listens again, but soon she interrupts the person at the other end. "Whatever. But unless you want to go looking for a new job in two years' time, you'll stop scavenging from other departments." Her opposite must have said something rude, for she grimaces, saying, "Bite me!" before she drops the phone back into her bag.

The lift stops on the second floor to let in another group of guests. Shark Woman takes two steps backwards to make room for them, and that is when he catches a whiff of the shampoo and is catapulted from amused appreciation of her power play into the darker folds of primeval subconscious. The sensation isn't unknown to him — olfactory impulses are the only ones that'll trigger his warped memory, flooding his brain with sensations that have no connection to the present that his conscious mind is experiencing. It can be the sharp, spicy smell of curries from an Indian takeaway, or the mixture of petrol, melting asphalt, sweat and leather on a hot day; hell, once he'd gone through all the magazines at the ten-o'clock shop across the road, sniffing each one of them because a waft of printing ink on glossy paper set off that queasy feeling of familiarity.

But never before have his conscious and his subconscious been so at war. His conscious is tipping its head in wary analysis, remarking drily,  _Attractive, but no pussy cat. More of a jaguar. Stick your hands through the bars of that cage, and you'll never play the piano again._

The little Lost Boy in him, however, is murmuring something incoherent about soft curves, warm down duvets, contentment.

 _Soft curves?_  the voice of common sense scoffs.  _She's all bones and angles. In jaguars, bite force in relation to body size is maximised. No playing around with their prey either — those teeth are employed to pierce the brain. At best, we'd end up with scratches and claw marks,_ if _she deigned to notice us. So far, we haven't even registered on her radar._

 _Who's talking about Her?_  Lost Boy is quick to contradict.  _It's the shampoo we need to identify._

The rational part of his brain would like to point out that thousands of women probably use that same shampoo, but they've reached the ground floor and Ms Jaguar is leaving the lift. He should be continuing on towards the basement where the staff facilities are located, but before he knows it he's out in the lobby, following the mesmerising swing of her hips, registering out of the corner of his eye the scowl that Donald at the reception desk gives him.

He wouldn't have thought that a short person in such dangerously high heels could move so fast, but short of breaking into an unsightly jog there's no way he can keep up with her. He isn't above making a fool of himself in the interests of research, but there are the shallow steps leading from the pavement to the hotel lobby to consider, the ones she's striding down so confidently, but that he, even to this day, can only navigate at a shuffle. The disabled entrance is fifty feet to the left, but he can see through the fronds of the potted palms at the entrance that she has turned off to the right, her hand raised to hail a cab. He stops at the lobby doors to watch her get into the cab, tight-skirted bottom first, then legs with slim ankles swinging in parallel to each other in a smooth, practised movement.

He knows that the disappointment he feels is irrational. What would he have said if he had caught up with her?  _Hello, I'm Pete, your friendly hotel cook. What brand of shampoo do you use?_   She'd probably have called security.

He can imagine the headlines in the papers: MIDDLE-AGED PERVERT ARRESTED FOR ASSAULTING GUEST IN RENOWNED BRISTOL CONFERENCE HOTEL. He makes his way back to the reception desk, skirting the plush rugs that play havoc with his gait. Donald is still glowering at him.

"You're supposed to use the staff lifts," Donald says.

"Elderly  _and_  disabled," he replies, waving a hand at his greying hair. "Had to take the closest lift."

"There are people who run marathons with those," Donald continues, giving his leg a sideways glance.

He doesn't bother to point out that amputees running marathons use state-of-the-art prosthetics, not standard NHS issue that barely flexes at the knee. "Four stones less, and you could also be running marathons. Or, if you ran marathons, you'd probably weigh four stones less."

"I don't use my weight to get disability perks, now do I?" Donald says virtuously. Janet, the junior assistant, gives him a sympathetic smile behind Donald's back. "And you're not supposed to use the roof terrace for a smoke. It's reserved for guests. If you hadn't been up there, you wouldn't have had to use the lift."

He decides to ignore that and glances at the notices posted on various billboards, guiding conference participants to the right meeting rooms. There's something in the Avon Room entitled 'Energy from Waste', and Severn Room is hosting a symposium on marine accident prevention. The only medical do is in Frome Room, the biggest of their four conference rooms. It's called 'Public Health in the 21st Century'. Not the most likely choice for the future dean of an American hospital, but what does he know?

Leaning on the reception desk and scratching an eyebrow casually with his thumbnail he says, "American, early forties, five foot three or so, brunette, probably here for that medical conference thingy. Which room number?"

"I'm not helping you to harass hotel guests. Your shift started fifteen minutes ago," Donald adds, glancing at the clock. "I'm reporting you, for tardiness and for violation of hotel regulations." Janet shrugs apologetically, but busies herself quickly when Donald, catching the grimace Pete pulls at her, whirls round to check what his assistant is up to.

"Sod you!" he mutters, pushing himself off the desk. Donald is a smug bastard, but unfortunately there is no doubt that he'll be late — later than his habitual twenty minutes — and that the complaints against him are reaching a critical mass.

* * *

Three hours later he's hot, frustrated and angry. The temperature in the kitchen is well over 30°C, the place is too small for the roughly forty people hurrying around in it, and the noise level is deafening. How the hell is he supposed to cook decent grub when all he's got is bog-standard ingredients and a bunch of imbeciles to assist him?

Baz, the chef-de-cuisine, is indifferent to his problems. "I'm on a limited budget, here, Pete. As for your staff," glancing over the harried, flustered faces scurrying around them like ants whose hill has been disturbed by a termite eater, "if you treat them like the humans they are, instead of like mindless zombies, they might just start using the brains God has given them." In a lower voice he adds, "You know that you get the best we have."

"I goddam should. I'm the bloody saucier in the bloody restaurant of the supposedly best hotel in the bloody county, but we're producing mush that a school kitchen would refuse to feed to its students!"

"You're exaggerating," Baz says calmly.

"Look at this fucking bean!" He picks up the offending object from a large crate of fresh vegetables. It droops limply.

"Hey, keep your pranks off my stuff!" the entremetier yells.

They are interrupted by one of the waiters returning with a tray. He comes straight up to Baz. "Table Seven. They say the gravy's too salty."

Baz rolls his eyes, but only says, "I'll take care of it."

The waiter puts down the tray and waits. The offending dish consists of Mini Beef Wellingtons, steaks with a mushroom topping served in a pastry wrapping, accompanied by a red wine sauce.

He's fuming, absolutely fuming, now: sauces and gravies are his domain. "There's nothing to take care of," he says, thrusting the tray back at the waiter, who gives Baz an imploring glance. "It's not just  _gravy_ ; it's a red wine reduction, and it's not too salty. Bring them their food right back."

"Pete!" Baz says in a steely voice. All over the kitchen heads are raised; faces are peering out from between saucepans dangling from the ceiling; junior staff and trainees are inching closer to grab a prime position for the anticipated blow-up.

Help comes from an unexpected quarter. "Table Seven?" the potager, three ranges down, asks.

The waiter nods in confirmation. Baz raises an enquiring eyebrow.

"They sent the soup back, too," the potager supplies.

"Right," the waiter confirms.

Pete shoots a look of victory at Baz while a collective sigh of disappointment rises from the madding crowd robbed of its showdown: they're dealing with the kind of customer who finds a fault in everything, probably hoping for a free meal courtesy of the house if they complain enough. He moves over to the swing doors separating the kitchen from the restaurant: Table Seven should be well within view of the round glass panes set at eye level. He spots them at once: an elderly couple, probably here on one of those mini-breaks at reduced rates offered by the hotel during off-peak times. They're the picture of righteous indignation, the man leaning forward, gesticulating and lecturing, while his wife listens and nods vigorously in agreement to whatever diatribes he's spouting. Pete can sense Baz behind him, peering over his shoulder.

"Here, let me through, I'll talk to them," Baz says. Better Baz than him. Baz is good at this kind of thing, defusing 'situations', calming guests, joking with them, drawing in the neighbouring tables till the troublemakers have a choice between giving in with good grace or appearing petty and foolish.

 _The neighbouring tables_. She's at Table Six, mere feet away from the troublesome couple at Table Seven. Seeing her leave the hotel, he'd assumed she was going out for dinner (who could blame her, given the swill they serve here?), but she must have returned to have dinner with 'Distinguished Gentleman in Dark Suit and Red Tie'. Distinguished Ogling Creep is more accurate.

He turns round, grabs the tray from the astonished waiter, and overtakes Baz before he can reach the table. Baz throws up his hands in despair, hisses "Mind your step!" at him, and turns back to the kitchen. The couple look up when he looms over them. He plasters a greasy smile over his face.

"Good evening, I'm Peter Barnes, your saucier. That means I'm responsible for sauces, gravies, etc., etc." He rolls his free hand expressively. "I hear there's a problem with the ... ummm ... gravy."

"Damn right, there is! It's too salty." the man says.

"Language, Bill!" his wife admonishes.

He places the tray on the table, grabs one of the two empty chairs by the back and turns it round so he can straddle it, taking up a position between the man and the woman. The woman gapes at him; 'Bill' bristles. He takes a teaspoon from Bill's cutlery ("May I?") and dips it into the saucière on the tray. Then he slowly brings it to his mouth, closes his lips over the spoon, and sucks the sauce off it, closing his eyes as though in gustatory ecstasy.

"Ahhhh," he sighs, "heavenly - that hint of spring onion! Although you might be right: it could do with a trifle more of  _something_."

Scrunching up his face in thought, he suddenly opens his eyes wide, as if blessed by an epiphany. "Salt! A teensy pinch of salt."

He takes the salt mill from the middle of the table and gives it a token shake over the saucière. Then he stirs the sauce with the same teaspoon that he'd used to taste it, scoops up some of the sauce in it and offers the spoon to Bill's wife. "Problem solved. Try it now."

Bill's wife backs off, revolted. There's a low murmur from the surrounding tables; more and more guests are becoming aware of the scene at Table Seven and are now openly turning in their seats to see how it will develop.

He shoves the spoon almost into Bill's face. "You, sir?" he asks politely.

Bill's face has turned an unhealthy shade of puce. "You're ... you're crazy!"

"So I'm told," he agrees obligingly. "Nutty as a fruitcake. Come, try it — my reputation is at stake here."

"Get that spoon out of my face!" Bill splutters.

"No? I'm hurt." He licks the sauce off the spoon once more, and then swivels around to the next table, Table Six, his true destination. "Perhaps the lady and gentleman here will honour me with their opinion."

The room has gone unnaturally quiet — all conversation at neighbouring tables has ceased, everyone is focused on his antics. Out of the corner of his eye he can see the round panes of the kitchen doors, now obstructed by faces peering through it into the dining room. The man in the red tie is sitting stiff as a ramrod, his face a polite mask. The woman, attired, he notes with approval, in a low-cut dress of red satin, is staring at him in open shock and disbelief. That dress is quite something; no wonder her companion was leering at her cleavage so unashamedly earlier on.

"Sir, ma'am, if I may ask for your judgment on this matter?" He leans forward confidingly. "A matter of honour — I'm sure you understand."

A variety of scents assails his nostrils: their food, the chap's cologne, the floral arrangement on the table. He can't distinguish her shampoo. Damn! He needs to get closer. Once again he dips the same old spoon into the saucière. When he brings it up again, he allows it to hover in the air indecisively for a moment before he guides it towards the lady, saying, "Ladies first. Ma'am, if I may ask you?"

She's staring at him wide-eyed. He raises his eyebrows slightly, encouragingly. Not that he really wants her to take the spoon from his hand; he wants a chance to close in.

"Your behaviour is offensive," the Ogler in the red tie says.

There's a movement from the kitchen area — Baz must have given up all hope of a felicitous outcome and is now sending out his strongmen. He doesn't have much more time. He starts making aeroplane buzzing sounds as one would for a recalcitrant toddler, moving the spoon in concentric circles until it is right at the woman's lips, leaning ever closer to her as he does so.

"Open up now!" he says in a sing-song, nudging the spoon against her lips, his upper body looming into her personal space. She opens obediently and takes the spoon into her mouth, apparently hypnotised by his actions.

"Well?" he prompts her, his mind in a whirl. He'd expected her to slap the spoon aside and box his ears; she doesn't seem the type to be overrun by impudence, not even when it comes in the shape of a Sherman tank in human form.

"It's ... " Her voice rasps — she clears her throat. "It's great."

But he's hardly listening. He has leaned in so far that he's mere inches from her face. She doesn't flinch away, but fuck, fuck and triple fuck! The perfume she's using this evening is one of those expensive affairs that cover everything else. He's about to plant a kiss on her cheek so he can bury his nose in the hair that's falling in a soft wave over her ear when Baz's henchmen reach him and pull him back. Baz is behind them, apologising profusely to the incumbents of both tables and to anyone else who catches his eye.

He is dragged, almost carried, back to the kitchen. The doors swing open as if by magic and the crowd on the other side parts like the Red Sea as he's brought in. An unholy silence reigns, the hushed calm before the executioner's axe swishes down.

"What?" he says. "The Lady in Red said my sauce was great. So there!"

Baz comes back through the swing doors, shaking his head. He takes one look at the masses assembled around the kitchen doors and barks, "Back to work, all of you!" The kitchen staff dispel reluctantly.

"I don't understand you," Baz says to him. "I really, honestly, don't understand you."

He shrugs. He doesn't need Baz to tell him that this stunt wasn't worth the bother it's going to cause — he's no step further to identifying the shampoo, and the shampoo's user must now have him down as a total wacko. He won't get within fifty yards of her again.

"I pacified the couple at Table Seven with a free meal deal, but the chap at Table Six is going to complain to management."

He looks up from the toes of his shoes which he has been contemplating. "What's his problem? I didn't do anything to him; he wasn't even involved."

"You were more or less on his wife's lap."

"She's never his wife!" he says, distracted by the ludicrousness of such an idea. "He was leering at her far too desperately to be her husband. Besides, she isn't wearing a ring, and she has an American accent, whereas he's definitely a British public school product. He's just cheesed off because he wants to impress her. Instead he came across as a wimp who can't deal with a simple scullery boy."

"Your psychoanalytical skills would be put to better use if you applied them to holding down a job. You've botched this one up royally, and you'll probably get canned. I can phone around and see if I can find something for you, if you want. You're a right old fart, but you're the best cook I ever had." Baz sighs and turns back to his work.

After his shift ends he goes up to the roof terrace for a smoke. He doesn't allow himself to dwell on the thought that this could be his last smoke up here. He finds the place calming; one has a wonderful view of the city without being distracted by the noise of the traffic. On clear nights like these one can see the lights of Cardiff across the mouth of the Severn. He moves over to his favourite spot, the west side of the terrace overlooking the Avon Gorge, a dark snake winding its way to the Severn. Behind him are the lights of Bristol, cars still crawling through the streets despite the lateness of the hour.

He's within ten yards of her before he spots her. She must have noticed his approach long before he became aware of her, because she's facing him, leaning against the balustrade with her back. She's a lot smaller without her heels, and she exudes practically no aggressive sexuality now that she's clad casually and is hugging herself with her arms. He almost prefers her like this. Almost, because she's tense as a guitar string, which is not an attractive look on any woman. It doesn't surprise him, though — after his act in the dining room she probably has him down as a dangerous nutter. If it weren't for the ruddy shampoo, he'd leave; his tranquillity is disturbed by her presence, and the last thing he needs after tonight's ordeal is a hysterical woman who is convinced that he'll murder her. This, however, could be his last chance to get close to her, so he slowly moves to a spot about five feet from her, rather like a twitcher approaching a rare bird.

"Nice view," he says with studied casualness, as he pulls out his cigarettes. He takes one out, and then he offers her the packet, careful not to make any sudden movements.

"You know, I don't smoke."

He shrugs, filing away in the back of his head that where she comes from, they don't seem to use commas in direct speech. The way she says it, it sounds like,  _You_ know _I don't smoke_. "It's relaxing," he says. "You're a trifle tense."

She snorts at that. It's a pity that her face is in the dark. "Who's surprised?" she says.

"If it comforts you, I'll probably get dismissed." He turns out towards the horizon, lighting his cigarette and wondering what he can do to make her stay. But apparently she has no immediate intention of leaving — she, too, turns and looks out into the darkness. The light from the windows below them cast a faint glow on her face, so he can finally examine her. The fact that she isn't fleeing from his presence is interesting.

"How long have you been working here?" she asks suddenly.

"About six months," he answers, trying to get his mind around what is happening here. He knows that women find him attractive, especially women in the best years (or past their prime, depending on how one phrases it). For some unfathomable reason he seems to appeal to their mothering instincts or whatever it is that makes them swoop in on the kind of bad boy they would have avoided in their younger years. Possibly they are catching up on all the things they missed in their youth, and he's some midlife crisis diversion for them.

Whatever it is, it seems to have caught hold of the woman next to him, who should, if she had the slightest sense of self-preservation, be running for the hills yelling, _Madman, madman!_  Not that he's complaining, but it's odd, definitely odd. She's examining him now, one of her hands fidgeting with something — probably a chain — around her neck, tugging at it in a way that makes him want to pull her hand away before he's forced to crawl around on the ground to pick up scattered pearls, or whatever it is she's wearing. He rubs his right thigh, or rather, the spot where his right thigh should be, abstractedly; it's a little tick he has that he can't explain, an automatic reaction to situations that are somehow out of his control. This situation is definitely developing in ways that he hadn't anticipated, but he needs to tread warily if he is to walk the narrow line between getting the information he wants and being charged with sexual assault.

He's still trying to figure out how to show interest without coming over as a complete pervert when she sighs, saying, "You know, you aren't exactly making this easy for me."

Excuse us?  _He_ isn't making things easy for  _her_? Who is trying to make a pass at whom, please? Nonetheless, he can see where she got the idea that he's interested in her: he was, as Baz pointed out, practically on her lap down in the restaurant, and from her perspective it might seem as though he followed her onto the terrace. He's a bit surprised, though, that she wants him to take more of an initiative in the matter. After all, she's the Doctor Lady seducing the lowly scullery boy, and she doesn't strike him as the type who waits to be asked, although Americans tend to be odd about these things.

She's still staring down at the streets, so he has an opportunity to observe her. Considering that she's in the act of seducing a hotel employee she's inexplicably tense, nervous. Could he be wrong in assuming that she gets whatever she wants, whether at work or in bed?

"You're nervous," he remarks.  _So what?_  a part of him interjects.  _Never mind what she is or wants — get your bloody nose in her hair!_  But this is too interesting to miss.

She looks at him incredulously. "Is this a 'state the obvious contest'?"

"Why should you be nervous? You're picking up a man in a hotel at a conference where no one who could find out about it is ever likely to see you again. Where's the danger? Unless this is the first time you're doing this, and you're feeling guilty. Husband back in the States and two kids?" He looks at her left hand. "No, not a husband. Boyfriend, then, or partner, and some sort of family. Patchwork, perhaps. Something you don't want to lose if this goes wrong." Yes, that sounds likely.

Not to her, it seems, for she gives a low chuckle. Not a nice one, no. A 'this is ridiculous' chuckle. And she's facing him now, anger in her face. He should placate her before she waltzes off in a fit. Unfortunately, his curiosity is more powerful than his ability to placate irate females.

"Okay, not cheating on anyone at home. That makes your guilt all the more surprising. Unless your last partner was a real git, and you're worried about repeating the experience. A womaniser and cheater?" he thinks aloud. "Nope, can't be; you wouldn't worry about that before a one-night stand." It suddenly dawns on him: "You got raped."

A little movement of her head, just a twitch, shows him that the latter assumption is wrong — but not so wrong that she contradicts him verbally. Bingo! "He abused you. Hit you?"

She freezes and stares at him through widened eyes, her breathing accelerating. For a moment he fears that she's reliving some unpleasant experience that her ex put her through; he's heard of victims of domestic violence experiencing flashbacks and losing consciousness of their physical surroundings. After a few (very unpleasant) seconds she snaps out of it. His relief is short-lived.

"You. Are. A. Total. Ass!" She snaps each word off, the venom in her voice contrasting with its low tremulous tone. Then she turns on her heels and marches off.

He opts against following her. Somehow he feels that this is not the best time to ask her what shampoo she uses.

 


	3. Inside Information

**_Princeton, September 2011_**

_"Dr James Wilson!" the court orderly called out._

_The packed courtroom went silent; Wilson was the only defence witness apart from the defendant himself, and so far, the evidence had been staggeringly unequivocal. Wilson straightened his tie, got up and buttoned his jacket. He looked over at House, slumped in his wheelchair, face drawn and haggard, all the former bluster and self-confidence erased. His lawyer, sitting next to him, didn't look much better. Wilson wasn't surprised; he'd been running interference between them for weeks now, doing his best to prevent House from repelling the person standing between him and a major prison sentence. It had been tough going, but hopefully it would be over soon._

_He cast a look at Cuddy, seated as far away from House as was physically possible, pale, but determined. She had been on the witness stand already, where she had unintentionally done House a great favour. Her calm manner, the collected way she had recalled the incidents of that fatal May evening, and her dispassionate denial of any previous incidents of violence had worked in House's favour. Had she been tearful or shown the slightest outward sign of trauma or told any tales of domestic terror, the jury might have been moved. As it was, her stoic demeanour worked more to House's advantage than any of the fiery cross-examinations that House's attorney had held for his client as he'd tried to puncture the evidence collected by the police, the statements of the EM team that had been the first to arrive at the site, and the victims' accounts._

_House's own behaviour so far, however, had done little to mitigate the impression made by the pictures the state attorney had handed around of the demolished house featuring House's car poking out of the debris of the dining room. He'd sat silent and seemingly emotionless, never lifting his eyes to look at the evidence or at the witnesses, fidgeting endlessly with anything his hapless lawyer left lying within reach of his long fingers and seemingly bored by the whole procedure. He probably was bored, Wilson opined, for House had decided long ago how this was going to end, and he'd told his lawyer as much in the only meeting he'd deigned to attend before the trial._

"Domestic violence. Attempted homicide. First offence. Two years, three years max."  
"I'm sure I can get probation for you," Max, his attorney had said with a desperate air.  
"I'm not asking you to."  
"That's ... my job. To get you a fair deal."  
"What's fair about probation after nearly killing four people? I'm paying you because I've been told I can't do this without a lawyer, not because I want to be let off the hook. So go do your job, and don't bother me with 'strategy' or 'making a positive impression on the jury'."

_Which would be fine if House were feeling guilt for his deed, but guilt presupposed an awareness of one's misdeeds. House, however, couldn't even remember the events leading up to the crash, let alone the crash itself. His lack of interest in his own fate was not born of a desire to atone for his misdeed; it was in all probability a symptom of depression. 'Probability' being the key word here, because unsurprisingly House refused to entertain the notion that he might be mentally affected by the physical tribulations he had been subjected to, much less allow himself to be examined or treated._

_Wilson sat down in the witness stand, unbuttoned his jacket again, answered the questions pertaining to his identity, and swore to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. When Max asked him to recount the events of the evening, he told the jury everything that had occurred from the moment he had picked House up from his apartment till when House made him leave his car, managing to make his carefully pondered speech sound spontaneous and unrehearsed._

_"How would you describe Dr House's mood when you left the car, Dr Wilson?" Max asked._

_"Objection!" the prosecutor interrupted._

_"Objection overruled," the judge said in a bored voice._

_"He was," Wilson put in an artful pause, "disturbed. Disturbed and upset."_

_"Would you say he was angry?"_

_"Objection!" the prosecutor repeated. "The defence is influencing the witness with his choice of words."_

_"Objection sustained," the judge ruled._

_"Will you please describe what happened next?"_

_"Dr House drove the car to the end of the road. There he did a U-turn, and then he accelerated the car back towards me." Wilson was silent for a moment, looking at his hands. This time the silence was not rehearsed. What he was about to do could change the outcome of this trial. Then again, it might not. Either way he'd lose a friend, a good friend, in order to save another one who didn't want to be saved and who, if his memory was playing him false, didn't deserveto be saved. He cast back his mind to that god-awful evening in May, conjuring up an image of himself standing by the curb watching House's car approach at an insane speed, aiming straight at ..._

_"He ... he was going straight for the tree next to me, a big oak tree. When I realised what he was about to do, I stepped in front of the tree. He came straight on - I thought he'd mow me down. I jumped aside when he was - I don't know how close he was, but it seemed very close - and at that moment he finally swerved."_

_At this, a rumble of indignation went through the courtroom; it was obvious even to the uninitiated where Wilson was headed, and it was not a direction the vengeful crowd approved of at all._

_"So Dr House was not aiming for the house, but for the tree?" Max stated rather than asked._

_"Yes."_

_"What do you think his intention was in driving at the tree?" Max probed. They had agreed beforehand that Wilson was to volunteer his assumption, but now, sitting in the courtroom with House and Cuddy's eyes on him, it was more difficult than he'd anticipated. Max's question sounded stilted, pre-rehearsed, but there was no help for it now._

_Wilson cast a beseeching look at House. House stared back stony-faced. He hadn't agreed to this, but not being able to recall a single second of the entire fiasco himself, he had not been in a position to disagree either. "He wanted to kill himself," Wilson said quietly._

_There was an instant uproar. The judge banged his gavel; the prosecution looked outraged. The cross-examination, Wilson decided, would not be fun. He didn't dare look at Cuddy._

_"Was there any indication that Dr House was suicidal?" Max asked. This question was spontaneous, a result of the vibes of disbelief arising from the courtroom, but Wilson knew what Max wanted to hear._

_"Yes. He'd shown signs of suicidal behaviour in the weeks before the crash." Wilson recounted the experiment with the muscle-growing rat drug and the subsequent leg massacre in House's bathroom._

_"And other than that?"_

_"He took an overdose of oxycodone mixed with alcohol once, and he plunged a knife into a socket another time."_

_"Oh, bullshit!" House's head was up, his mien indignant._

_"Silence!" the judge ordered._

_"Those were not suicide attempts!" House insisted._

_"Mr Delaney, get your client under control," the judge advised._

_Max whispered a few words to House. House continued scowling, but he fell silent._

_As Wilson had anticipated, the cross-examination by the prosecution was no fun at all._

Given the amount of vicodin House had taken, could he be sure that House was aiming for the oak tree? _\- No, he couldn't._

Did he make a habit of endangering his own life to save the life of his badass, pill-popping, homicidal friend? (The prosecutor phrased it somewhat differently, but that was the essence.) _\- He hadn't really had time to think of his own danger when he'd stepped in front of the tree; it had been a gut reaction._

What had made him so sure that House, deterred from killing himself with the help of an oak tree, wouldn't simply swerve towards another tree to impale himself? _\- He hadn't been sure. He hadn't thought that far; he had been functioning on auto-pilot. He'd tried to avert the most pressing catastrophe without thinking ahead of all further catastrophes that might ensue. (That got him a hushed laugh from the audience.)_

Wouldn't House have swerved towards the road rather than towards the house if his intention had not been to harm Dr Cuddy or her property? _\- He really couldn't answer for House's intentions in swerving towards the house, but since his seat-belt wasn't fastened (the EMT had confirmed that much right at the start of the trial), chances were that House's harming propensities were directed against himself rather than against others._

Why would House, a world-renowned diagnostician and a newly-wed, want to kill himself at all?

_That one was easy. "His first relationship in ten years went to pieces, instead of regaining mobility in his leg he induced tumours, he relapsed after almost two years of sobriety, and you're asking why he was feeling depressed?" After that, the prosecution decided to let him go._

_Next, Max called House into the witness stand. Wilson had advised against it, but Max, ignorant of the havoc House could create and worried about the impression it would leave if House didn't testify himself, had prevailed. So far Max had only dealt with a bored House, a bored and depressed House. Not with a bored and aggravated House. It wasn't, Wilson told himself soothingly, as if House could incriminate himself in any way. At the worst he'd get the jury members' backs up, but there was no way he could add to the evidence already presented in court. And the sympathy points he earned as he wheeled himself into the witness stand might just outweigh whatever damage he could do by shooting off his mouth._

_Max had amassed a stunning compendium of incidents in which House had got assaulted: bar fights, assaults by patients, assaults by patients' families, etc. None of this was new to Wilson - in most cases he'd been the source of the anecdotes, for House had been less than helpful in the preparations for the trial. He'd also refused to rehearse the examination with Max, which had driven Max well-nigh crazy. Nonetheless, Max did a good job with what he'd got from Wilson and House's team; he asked House in each case what had provoked the incident ('My asshattery'), what had happened then ('I got socked on the nose/in the jaw/in the groin'), and how he had retaliated ('I didn't. I'd provoked it, so I got what I deserved.' Or, in the case of patients, 'I got the information I wanted. Why should I have hit back?'). The impression on the jury was good, there was no denying it. Maybe Max knew what he was doing after all._

_Next, Max steered towards House's only other relationship, the one with Stacy. Wilson closed his eyes in dismay. He'd warned Max to stay away from that hornet's nest._

_"Dr House, were there any physical altercations within that relationship?"_

_"If you mean, did Stacy hit me, yes. She'd slap me whenever she got mad at me."_

_"How often was that?"_

_"Pretty often. I'm not exactly easy maintenance."_

_"What was your response?"_

_"I'd let her. The sooner she got over it, the sooner I got laid."_

_"Did you ever hit her?"_

_"No."_

_"Not even when she hit you?"_

_"No."_

_"Didn't you try to protect yourself?"_

_House looked genuinely surprised. "From what? Stacy isn't Superwoman, you know."_

_"She's," Max consulted his notes, "well over five foot eight and in good shape, I've been told."_

_"Yeah, well, I'm over six feet and at the time I was in better shape. I was never in any danger."_

_"Did she throw objects at you?"_

_"Yep, every now and then. Not as a rule. I really am that irritating," he told the judge confidingly._

_"What did you do then?" Max asked._

_"I ducked." He gave Max an irritated look. "What did you want to hear - that I caught them and threw them back at her? I didn't."_

_Max was not amused. Drawing a deep breath, he picked up his notes and glanced through them. "Let me see ... right ... yes. Dr House, how did the relationship with Ms Warner end?"_

_"She left me."_

_"Why?"_

_"We had a disagreement over my health."_

_"Could you be more specific?"_

_"She ignored my express wishes and ordered extensive surgery on my leg while I was in a coma. I was pissed. Very pissed. After five months of it she'd had enough."_

_"I see. How did you react?"_

_"Drank myself into a stupor. A long stupor."_

_"And then?"_

_"And nothing."_

_"Did you try to contact her? Did you phone her? Drop by her place?"_

_"I'd just spent months being a total jerk to her. Why would I ...?" House opened his eyes wide in mock realisation. "Oh, you're asking whether I stalked her, got violent, crashed my car through her place. No, I didn't."_

_"You were dumped by a woman with whom you had been in a committed relationship for five years and whose arbitrary behaviour severely impaired your health, but you had no desire to force a physical confrontation on her," Max stated._

_Wilson could have told him that this was a mistake, a big mistake. House had been doing fine so far, but there were a few things one should never do. One, try to put words into House's mouth. Two, make assumptions about his feelings. Three, say anything critical about people House was connected to in any way. Any one of these errors of judgment brought out all the contrariness of the four-year-old hiding in House's breast.A bored, aggravated, and provoked House's breast._

_He now drew himself as upright as he could, his head tipped slightly at Max, his eyes narrowed. "Her 'arbitrary behaviour', as you call it, probably saved my life. Nevertheless, I would have liked to take my cane and shove it down her throat." Whether he really believed either of these statements was not something Wilson would have bet a dollar on._

_Max closed his eyes in despair. "But you didn't do it," he said weakly, trying to salvage the situation._

_House looked down at his lap, his lips pursed. Finally he said, "Nope. I drank and moped."_

_The rest of the examination was short. Max established that House had no recollection whatsoever of the crash or the time before it, and then ended his examination._

_The prosecutor was less benign. "Dr House, what can you recall of the events of May 17?"_

_"Weren't you listening?"_

_"Dr House!" the judge reprimanded._

_"He's wasting your time and mine," House pointed out._

_"You have nothing better to do, unless you consider spending the night in jail for contempt of the court better than this, and I'm getting paid for sitting here. Answer his questions."_

_"Fine. Nothing. I remember nothing."_

_"So you're suffering from amnesia."_

_"Yes. You heard my neurologist's opinion on that."_

_"I want to hear yours. From what I'm told you're an expert in your own right. What do you think is the cause of your amnesia?"_

_"It's post-traumatic amnesia, a result of the car crash."_

_"According to the medical report there was no major head trauma, so it could also be psychogenic amnesia."_

_"Too bad we'll never know," House said with a quirk that could have been a grin._

_"Correct me if I'm wrong, but psychogenic amnesia is often caused by stressful situations and is also known as repressed memory syndrome."_

_House was silent._

_"Dr House?" the prosecutor prodded._

_"You didn't ask anything."_

_"So is it possible that someday you'll regain your memories of what transpired that day?"_

_"It is possible," House said through his teeth._

_"And that this hasn't happened yet four months after the incident is, in your eyes, merely a medical misfortune?"_

_"Misfortune? What the hell gives you the idea that I'd consider it a misfortunethat I can't remember the occasion on which I tried to kill four people or myself?"_

_"So do you consider it possible that you were attempting to kill Dr Cuddy and her guests?"_

_"Objection!" Max called out. "He's asking my client to speculate about .."_

_"Objection sustained."_

_"Fine," the prosecutor conceded. "Dr House, Dr Cuddy testified that in the early afternoon of that day you," he pretended to consult his notes, "pushed her against a wall. Do you find Dr Cuddy's testimony credible?"_

_"Objection!" Max yelled._

_"Yes," House said, overriding whatever else Max was shouting. "She - she wouldn't lie about something like that." Max buried his face in his hands._

_The prosecutor licked his lips. "If you pushed her against a wall using your superior strength, can you be sure that you did **not** crash the car into her house in order to do her bodily harm?"_

_House looked down at his hands. "No. No, I can't," he said in a whisper._

_Wilson followed Cuddy outside the courtroom. Might as well get it over with now, he thought, tugging at his tie which seemed to be strangling him. She was marching down the hallway at a pace that mirrored her mood: no hip swing, no casual toss of the head, only tense shoulders and a head carried stiffly upright. She stopped short and swung round to face him when she realised who was intercepting her._

_"How's Rachel? Better?" he asked._

_Cuddy unsurprisingly ignored his peace overture. "Acquitted of attempted manslaughter due to lack of evidence, probation for all the other crap. I hope you're satisfied with what you did!" she spat at him._

_"The jury acquitted him, not me," Wilson said. Amazingly, House's admission that he couldn't be sure whether he had tried to kill Cuddy or not had done more for him in the eyes of the jury than all Max's attempts to place him in a good light._

_"On the basis of your evidence! I hope you can sleep well at night knowing that a homicidal maniac, a stonedhomicidal maniac, is on the loose. Has it occurred to you that the next time he gets pissed at your dating someone, you'll be in the line of fire?"_

_"Cuddy, I told the truth. He was driving straight at that tree."_

_"How come this is the first I'm hearing of it? You said nothing about it when you made your statement to the police that night."_

_Wilson tugged a tired hand through his hair. "I was in shock. I have no idea what they asked me or what I answered. It was only afterwards, when I was calm enough to let the scene play again before my mind's eye that it struck me what House had been trying to do."_

_"How convenient!" Cuddy sneered._

_"Cuddy, let it go! He's punished enough as it is - he's lost his leg. How do you benefit by putting him behind bars for a few years?"_

_"The loss of his leg was no punishment. It was the direct result of his stupidity in driving under the influence of vicodin and crashing his car, but there's no connection whatsoever to what he was trying to do to me. Or are you saying that every amputee who loses a limb in an accident is being punished by the deities?"_

_They were on dangerous ground now. Wilson drew himself up and pointed both hands at her in a parallel downward movement. "Are you saying that your order to have his leg amputated was not connected in any way to his nearly killing you?"_

_"I didn't 'order' it; I approved of the procedure that the surgeon in charge of the operation advised."_

_"And if House hadn't just crashed into your dining room, you probably would have gone with Chase's suggestion," Wilson surmised._

_"You're saying you can't be held accountable for what you said that evening because you were in shock, but you're holding me...," Cuddy's voice rose half an octave in indignation. She stopped herself and took a deep breath. Then she drew herself upright, a tight, false smile on her lips. "You know, Wilson, you're right. I should have gone for Hourani and Chase's little shpiel and let Chase try to save the leg."_

_She paused for effect. "Then House would have died in the OT, and maybe I wouldn't be waking up every night in a cold sweat from nightmares in which my bedroom walls collapse and a blue-eyed, hatchet-swinging zombie stands towering above my bed."_

_She turned sharply on her heel and left him standing there. Wilson stared after her for a long moment, his hand going automatically to the tense muscles at the back of his neck, before he turned back to the courtroom. He froze when he saw House in his wheelchair a mere ten yards from where Cuddy and he had been standing and debating, oblivious to the people exiting the courtroom. It was obvious from the expression on House's face that he'd heard the last part of the exchange, possibly even more. His eyebrows were slightly raised, his eyes wide open, his cheek muscles slack, his mouth soft and vulnerable. He'd seen that look once before, when House had returned to his apartment to find Stacy gone. As Wilson moved towards him, his guts tightening and concern welling up in him, House's mien changed perceptibly. His eyes swivelled away, his facial muscles tightened and his eyes narrowed. Portcullis down, drawbridge up, Wilson thought._

_"You okay?" he asked, more as a matter of form than because he expected an honest answer._

_"Peachy. Just got bailed out of jail, didn't I, so I can continue on my path of murder and mayhem," House said tightly._

_"House, she didn't ...,"_

_But House was wheeling himself towards the elevator._

* * *

"Dr Wilson?" the nurse at the desk calls.

Wilson looks up from his journal in mild surprise. He's sure he has got his day sorted and all his chores done.

"Phone call. It's Dr Cuddy," the nurse smiles. She probably thinks it's romantic, these regular calls that sweet Dr Wilson gets from an attractive woman, and Wilson doesn't bother to disillusion her. Not everyone here is as lucky as he is; that there is no girlfriend out there pining for James Wilson MD is the least of his worries, and many a person here on the ward would be happy to have as few cares as he does.

He rises to take the handset that she's holding out to him, smiling his thanks. Then he moves to a more secluded corner of the room.

"Hello, Cuddy," he says. "A surprise call?" It's not her day to call.

"Peter Barnes," she says in answer. "Does that name ring a bell?"

"Oh, crap," Wilson says, looking around for a chair. "Oh, _crap_!" He finds one and sinks down in it. _Breathe slowly, regularly_. "How did you find him?"

"I didn't even know he was lost." This with a hint of sarcasm. Wilson isn't surprised that Cuddy isn't happy.

"Then he found you."

"Ran into me. In England."

That, at least, is no surprise. "What were you doing there?"

"I'm still there. I'm on a medical conference. What is all this about? Why is he running around as Peter Barnes?"

Wilson props an elbow on his knee and rests his forehead on his hand. He can feel the tension knotting up his shoulders. "It's his new identity. Did he recognise you?"

There's a silence at the other end. Then, "He ... pretended not to. Are you saying he _wasn't_ jerking me around?"

"Probably not. He has retrograde amnesia."

"Wilson, compared to you and House I'm a crappy doctor, but I'm not an idiot! He had amnesia right after the crash, but by the time his trial began only the crash itself and possibly a few hours around it were still gone. The rest had all returned. Retrograde amnesia is not a condition that worsens over the course of time."

"This isn't from the crash. It's from afterwards."

"What happened?" Despite everything, he can hear the concern in her voice. Well, that'll disappear in a few moments, once she hears what he has to tell her, because she isn't going to like it. At all.

"He had electroshock therapy." He doesn't know why he's bothering to dish the information out in bite-size portions; Cuddy will wring every little bit of it out of him.

"What for? His depressions? And what the hell went wrong? Total retrograde amnesia is extremely rare."

Wilson sits up and leans back, closing his eyes. There's no way of telling her this that'll go down well, which is why to this day he has never told her about it. House has always been the elephant in their drawing room. She never asks; he never volunteers information. When their friendship picked up again after a four-year hiatus, this was the unspoken pre-condition to their tentative truce.

"It wasn't for his depressions. He - he asked Foreman to do it for him with the intention of erasing his episodic memory."

"That's insane, totally insane! He could have lost a lot more than his episodic memory. Foreman agreed to this? And you didn't stop it?"

"They worked it all out - they bored holes in his skull and placed the electrodes so that his hippocampus would be shocked but the rest left intact. As far as we could tell afterwards, it worked. As for my opinion on the procedure, he wasn't interested. He never has been, has he?" He can't keep the bitterness out of his voice. House did this in the knowledge that if it worked, Wilson would be left back alone, and if it didn't, if it went wrong, he'd be a burden on Wilson for the rest of his presumably short life.

"And what was his aim in electrocuting his hippocampus?" Cuddy asks acidly.

"He said that he only knew one period of bliss after the crash, and that was the short time frame during which he remembered nothing of what had transpired the months before: the break-up, his relapse, the crash. Once the amnesia wore off he was miserable, more miserable than before. He wanted the bliss of ignorance back again. He figured out with Foreman how to do the EST, he got everything ready for his new identity, found a private clinic in England where we could do it, and then ...,"

"So you helped him!" Cuddy accuses.

Wilson's voice rises self-defensively. "It was either that or ... or he'd be six feet under now. The hope of being able to forget was the only thing that kept him from offing himself."

"Great! Amnesia as the new vicodin! You and Foreman can be proud of yourselves."

Her attitude is predictable, but nevertheless annoying. _She_ has no disadvantages from this - she isn't the one who lost her only friend. Quite the opposite, in fact. "You do see that what he did benefits you, don't you? If he has no memories of you, he is no danger to you any longer."

"Excuse me, but if I remember correctly, _you_ were the one who testified in court that he never _was_ a danger to me. You said he was trying to commit suicide, not crash into the house." She pauses, but before Wilson can think of a response she continues, "What I object to is that he gets to forget and live a carefree life at the other end of the world, because he can afford to nuke his brain, while I can't afford to do that. I have responsibilities - a daughter who is dependent on me. I'm stuck in reality, the reality _he_ inflicted on me, with the distrust and the nightmares and the panic attacks every time a car engine howls up the street. This is typical House - he creates havoc in other people's lives, only to disappear to Never-Never Land!"

There is no arguing with that, since it pretty much mirrors his view of the proceedings. They are both silent for some time. "How is he?" Wilson finally asks, when he thinks she may have calmed down enough to answer the question without going into another rant.

Apparently she has. "Good, from what I could tell. Different. I wasn't sure it was really him until you confirmed his identity. At first I thought he has a British _doppelganger_. He's clean-shaven and has an authentic British accent - at least, it seemed authentic to me. He ... he's the same in some ways, but he's changed in others. And a lot more ...," she stops to think, "relaxed, I'd say. He looks younger, less - scrunched up. He's working as a cook at the hotel that's hosting the conference. His gait - it's almost normal!" She sounds genuinely surprised, and Wilson realises that the last time Cuddy saw House was in court, a gaunt figure hunched up in a wheel chair.

"A cook? How's that working out?" One of his objections to House's amnesia scheme had been that House would never be able to work as a doctor again, but even his, Wilson's, worst-case scenarios had not included a job so little suited to House's need to keep those synapses loaded and firing. "Is ... are his cognitive abilities compromised?"

"I didn't see enough of him to do a complete cognitive panel," Cuddy remarks. "He seemed much the same as usual. I think, though, that he may have gotten himself fired tonight." Her laugh is slightly hiccup-y. "The people at the next table didn't like his sauce. I'll tell you about it when I visit you next."

"That'll be great."

"Why England?" Cuddy asks. "Why a false British identity? Wouldn't it have been easier to have got him one here?"

"I have no idea. House's point was that the moment he woke up from the procedure - if it worked - he'd be trying to find out who he was. After all, once he had amnesia he wouldn't remember that he was trying to forget about himself. If he'd got himself an American identity, he'd have figured out his true identity in no time, because he'd soon have worked out where to look. With a British identity he'll have looked in Britain first, and although he'll have realised by now that he isn't Peter Barnes, it is possible that he'll never figure out that he's an American. And before you ask - he knew that he'd do a perfect British accent and not even know it wasn't his, because apparently it _is_ his accent. One of his accents. His father was based in Britain for three years when he was a child, and later on in Egypt he spent most of his time with a British family that lived there. He said that as a child he'd use both accents interchangeably, so if he woke up in England surrounded by Brits, chances were he'd revert to an English accent and be none the wiser."

After a pause, Wilson asks what is foremost on his mind, "Will you see him again?"

"I'll try."

"Will you tell him who you are? Who _he_ is?" He can feel his anxiety level rising.

There's a noticeable hesitation at the other end. "No. It wouldn't do any good. He might accept who he is, but he won't remember."

Wilson leans his head in his hands in relief. Whatever else he and Foreman and House had anticipated, it had not been that someone who'd known him, really known him, would run into him in England. "I'd ask you to say hi from me, but ...," he trails off, an infinite sadness radiating out from his breast into the cavities of his torso. It's not fair, it just isn't fair! He spent years, _decades_ , keeping House from self-destructing, only to have to let his friend go in the end, and now it's Cuddy, the woman who dropped House when he needed her, who gets to see him and talk to him, to see how he's doing, how he's living, whether he's happy, whether he has friends ...

"Yeah," Cuddy says quietly. Knowing him as well as she does, she probably senses what he's feeling. "I'll tell you all about him when I come back. Good night, Wilson."

It's still light outside in Pennsylvania, but in Bristol it must be around midnight. "Good night, Cuddy," he says.

He gets up to return the handset to the nurse. When she takes it he moves away, but then he turns back to the desk. "Ah, Emma?" he says. She raises an enquiring eyebrow. "Could you ask Dr Nolan whether he has time for an extra session with me tomorrow? I think I may need it."

"Sure, Dr Wilson," she says, noting it down in the protocol. "Would you like to see him now?"

Wilson wonders whether his distress is so visible. "If he can make it. Yes, that would be nice."

"I'll ask," the nurse says. She takes up the telephone. Wilson returns to the ward and picks up his abandoned journal. He stares at the pages blankly, his mind on another man who once spent some months here.


	4. Roast Mutton

He is woken by the ringing of his telephone. He lies there drowsily, waiting for the answer machine to take over.

"Hi, Pete. It's Janet, Janet from Reception. Management wants to see you today at noon." There's a pause. "I heard about what happened yesterday and I just wanted to say that I'm sorry ... I mean, I'm sorry we won't be working together anymore. Not that we were really working together." She gives a little giggle, and he rolls his eyes. "Oh, and that doctor whose name and room number you wanted last night: she asked about you today."

He's suddenly wide awake. He rolls over and picks up the phone. "Hello. Sorry I took so long - I was in the bathroom."

"Oh, hello, Pete." There is an awkward pause.

"You've got the room number of that American doctor?"

"Oh, yes. Yes, she's in Room 354. Her name is Dr Lisa Cuddy."

"Brilliant. Thanks, Jane."

"Janet. ... Though the information isn't of much use to you now, is it?"

"Why not?"

"Well, you got yourself sacked, didn't you?"

"So?"

"Oh, right." She sounds disappointed. Then she adds hopefully, "Will we be seeing you around?"

"Could be," he says vaguely. "Thanks anyway."

Putting the phone down, he sits up and swings over to the edge of the bed. Picking up his crutches from where they are leaning against the wall next to the bed, he heads for the bathroom. After a quick shower and a shave he's more or less ready to go. He's early for the meeting with management, but he wants to drop by Ms Cuddy first anyway - he has a sneaky suspicion that management won't want a sacked employee to hang around the hotel for longer than necessary. That leaves him with a tricky question: what to wear. He doesn't want to be too neat - no reason to give management the impression that he's kow-towing to them - but he doesn't want to repel Lisa Cuddy. A white Oxford shirt and jeans, he decides, but no tie. A tie would be over the top. He takes the clothes from the wardrobe and hops over to the bed. There he stuffs his prosthetic into the right leg of the jeans before strapping it on; it's easier than trying to thread it through the jeans once it's fastened. After casting a quick glance in the mirror he leaves his flat to catch the bus.

He marches into the hotel through the front entrance, another no-no, but unfortunately Donald is not on duty today and his replacement doesn't seem to notice or care. When he reaches the third floor, his happy anticipation fades somewhat, and by the time he knocks on the door of Room 354 he's pretty certain that this will end in a fiasco. He may be a social inept, but it's obvious even to him that reminding an abused woman of her trauma won't have earned him the epithets 'caring' or 'supportive'. He hadn't meant to hurt her or to poke around in her wounds; he'd just been curious, but it is unlikely that she'll consider this a mitigating circumstance. He leans against the wall next to the door, not sure whether he would rather that she be there and answer to his knock, or that she be out and he miss her.

Before he can decide the door is pulled open. There is a short silence, for the duration it takes her to figure out that the person who knocked isn't standing straight ahead but around the corner, and then her head pokes out of the doorway.

"Hi," she says.

He examines his shoes for a moment before daring to look at her sideways. She's dressed professionally in an executive style black skirt and jacket with a pink blouse underneath and the obligatory heels. Seeing her close up by daylight for the first time, he corrects his estimate of her age: she's in her mid-forties if not older, and judging by the puffy state of her eyes she didn't sleep too well. Courtesy of his stupidity, no doubt.

"Morning," he answers and waits for her anger to pour out over him. Nothing happens. He dares another look. She's mustering him with interest. No doubt she didn't get a good look at him before either. "I, umm, wanted to apologise for last night. I ... " How exactly do you apologise for the tactless things you said without referring to them? He's on the verge of putting his foot into it again.

"That's okay." She leans against the jamb, half smiling at him. It's encouraging, to say the least, even if it's a trifle surreal to be smiled at by a woman who not twelve hours ago seemed ready to gouge out his eyes.

"Want a decent dinner tonight?" he asks. She arches an eyebrow. "Better than the swill here. I know the best cook in Bristol," he concludes pointedly.

She smiles even more at that, one finger twirling a strain of hair into locks. He feels like a teen in the schoolyard tagging behind the school belle. "I thought you cook _here_."

"I do. Did," he amends. "Getting the can today. But this place hampered my style. I can do better at home."

"You want me to come to your place?" she says doubtfully.

When she says it like that, he can hear how iffy it sounds; it's not what protective parents would advise their daughters to do. "Don't worry. I won't try to get into your knickers," he says, and immediately wants to kick himself. Her git of a boyfriend probably mouthed reassuring nothings like that before knocking the stuffing out of her. Looking at it from her point of view, he sees what a stupid proposition this was from the start.

"Forget it," he says, "we can meet for a drink at a pub, if you like." He rubs his thigh, but stops at once when he sees her eyeing his hand movement.

"No, it's fine," she says abruptly. "Dinner at your place. Shall I come there or will you pick me up?"

"I'll pick you up," he says, too stupefied at this turn of events to consider how he's to do that. "Will seven-ish be okay?"

"Yes, that's fine."

"Great! I'll see you at seven, then," he says, feeling buoyant. "My name is Pete. Pete Barnes."

"I know," she says. "Casual?" she asks as he turns away.

He eyes her severe get-up and says, " _Very_ casual," with a suggestive quirk of his eyebrows.

To his surprise she laughs as she shuts the door to her room.

The interview with management is long-winded and predictable; most of what the starch-shirt says glitches off him like water off a duck's back: he knows he's a liability to the hotel and untenable; he doesn't need someone twenty-five years younger than him to tell him so. Besides, he has this evening's menu to plan. The dinner has to be easy to prepare in advance, because he has to come back to the hotel to pick her up, and he doesn't want to spend another hour in the kitchen while she's around. An arugula salad as a starter, then a main dish (not pork - lots of Americans are Jewish; beef or mutton) and a dessert. He'll make a carrot-and-parsnip julienne with lemon vinaigrette as a side dish; that can be served cold. He's undecided about the dessert. It's unlikely that she'll eat much of it - judging by her figure, she'll probably pass altogether. Perhaps a simple fruit salad? No, he's already got a salad. No sense in something rich like chocolate mousse cakes, his preferred choice. A compromise: small apple pies with vanilla ice cream. Sweet enough to pass as a dessert, but with fruit in it to give an impression of pseudo-healthiness.

Management still isn't done lecturing him, so he compiles a mental shopping list next. When he's done with that, he interrupts rather rudely (he should have done this ten minutes ago), throws his hotel ID badge on the table and walks out.

After a short detour to an Italian delicatessen on Whiteladies Road he leaves the bus on Kellaway, where there's a butcher, to get some fresh meat. After examining the display he opts for a rack of lamb. It's only a short walk to Tesco's from there, where he does the rest of his shopping. He spends most of the afternoon toasting hazelnuts, chopping herbs, preparing the pastry for the apple pies, scooping out potato balls for his Parisienne potatoes, searing the lamb, preparing the crust. Around five o'clock he casts a glance around his kitchen - the rickety table with its dented wood, the two mismatched chairs, his chipped crockery - and decides to pay his landlord a visit. He makes his way to the ground floor and knocks on the door that separates the ground floor flat from the entrance hall and staircase.

Gavin, a short, balding postal worker, musters him with some surprise. "Can I help you?" he asks politely.

"I hope so. Got a tablecloth?"

"Don't think so." He disappears, but returns within minutes, shaking his head.

"Napkins?" he asks, not yet ready to lose hope. "Candlestick and a candle?"

"You'd better come in," Gavin tells him resignedly. They've been living in the same house for three years now, but it's the first time he's entered Gavin's flat. While Gavin roots around in his kitchen, he looks around the living room. There are shelves from floor to ceiling along every wall, but Gavin has practically no books. It's mostly nature magazines of the past fifteen years, ordered by title, year and month, and a truly formidable collection of CDs, ordered alphabetically and colour-coded with little stick-on dots according to some obscure system that he'll need a few moments to decipher. Some CDs sport up to four different dots, others have only one. The bottom-most dot is obviously genre, but he's still working on the others when Gavin reappears with white napkins, silver napkin rings and a candle.

"'Ere, be nice to my napkin rings. They were a present from my godmother at my baptism. Can't find a candlestick - I guess my ex took 'em with her when she left - but you can always stick the candles into an empty bottle or something. Who's coming over?"

"Just a friend," he replies. "Have you got some decent music? I need something soothing for dinner."

Gavin stares at him. "'Haven't you go' any music?"

"I'm not sure she shares my taste."

" _She_ , right? Well, tell me something about 'er, something for me to go on. Age?"

"About fifty, give or take."

"No spring chicken, then." He pulls a thick folder from a shelf and leafs through it. Pete fidgets impatiently. He doubts Gavin needs to check in his catalogue to find specific CDs; someone as obsessive about cataloguing his CDs knows exactly what he possesses and where each CD stands. Gavin comes back after a moment and pulls three CDs off the shelf, giving them a caressing dusting before he hands them over to Pete.

He looks at them, and then at Gavin. "You're kidding, aren't you? Is it 'Bald Guys' Day' or something?"

"Sting isn't bald," Gavin points out. "Women like him. Elton John's _Love Songs_ might be the better choice if you're thinking of a slow dance after dinner." This is said without any sort of innuendo or inflection; Gavin is patently the type who doesn't think in metaphors. "Personally, I prefer the _Serious Hits_ , but Phil Collins's voice isn't romantic in the classical sense." He looks up at Pete. "You'd better hope it _is_ 'Bald Guys' Day' for her, otherwise you don't stand much of a chance."

"Don't _need_ a chance," he murmurs, brushing a self-conscious hand over the bald spot at the back of his head.

"Right, you're inviting a lady friend over for a candlelight dinner for the sake of conversation," Gavin says sarcastically.

His mind casts around for a good reason why he'd wine and dine a total stranger. "She's American. I'm thinking of going there some time. She could be useful to have on my Friends list."

"You don't have a Facebook account, do you?" Gavin says suspiciously. "You shouldn't, you know. They spy out all your personal data, chart your movements, invade your privacy. They're the new mafia. No, not the mafia; the Gestapo, the KGB, they ...,"

"My roast," he says quickly. "Got to rescue my roast. Cheers, Gavin. I'll return your stuff to you tomorrow." He turns to go, but then a thought strikes him. "Hey, can I borrow your car?"

"Can you drive?" Gavin asks with a doubtful glance at his leg.

"Everyone can drive!" he states, conveniently forgetting to tell Gavin that he is not in possession of a licence.

Gavin harrumphs and goes to get his car keys, his body language screaming that he's unhappy about this. "The car's at the end of the lane. The door jams a little, but _don't_ slam it. Please."

"Don't worry," he says, pocketing the keys.

He completes his cooking preparations, takes a shower, puts on a blue shirt and leaves for the hotel. By the time he reaches Room 354, he's half an hour late and his shirt is suspiciously damp under the armpits. Gavin, the enemy of all modern technology, the eschewer of computers in general and the internet in particular, has no Satnav installed in his car. Dr Cuddy could well have given up on him by now, and even if she hasn't, she'll probably be scathing. She seems the type to expect punctuality.

"Fashionably late," Lisa Cuddy says when she opens her door, but she seems neither surprised nor put out. He murmurs something about rush-hour traffic as he watches her slip into flat slippers, his head tipped in contemplation. The shoes are a pity, but the jeans and the top, clingy in all the right places, make up for them.

Downstairs, she stops short when she sees Gavin's Vauxhall Astra. " _That's_ your car?"

"Yes," he lies glibly, looking the Astra over. Okay, it isn't what he'd choose to drive, nor would any car of his shine as brightly as Gavin's well-washed and polished family vehicle, but is there a sign posted on his forehead saying, 'Bad Boy - Not Good Family Material'? For all she knows, he has a charming wife and two well-behaved children in a terraced house on the outskirts of Bristol.

"Crap!" she says in a most unladylike manner.

He lets it slide, opting to end the conversation by opening the passenger door for her. Once he's seated, he leans over her to open the glove compartment. Gavin, predictably, has a _Bristol A-Z_ in there which he takes out and thrusts at Dr Cuddy.

"Here. You'll have to guide me. Filton Grove." She looks blankly at him, and then at the A-Z on her lap. He gives an exasperated snort born of embarrassment. "There's a road index at the back."

She opens it at the back, muttering, "Filton Grove," darkly and trailing a finger down the index. When she finds it, she opens the road atlas at the right page, and then traces the route back to the hotel. After checking the route twice she looks up at him incredulously. "You need me to guide you down _three_ miles? Okay, maybe four."

He doesn't answer - he's staring straight through the windscreen in mortification.

"How do you normally get here?" she asks.

"By bus," he mutters. That's what caused today's delay on the way down - he is so accustomed to his daily bus route with its fixed landmarks and predictability that he forgot that his sense of orientation is limited. "So if you want dinner before midnight ...," he says with a meaningful gesture at the A-Z.

"Okay," she says, "let's go. Straight ahead down this road, and then right onto, umm, Clifton Down."

It's a lot faster than the way down, where he had to keep stopping to ask the way, but it's still by no means a relaxing ride. When they stop before the house, she snaps the road atlas shut, saying, "I'll take a cab back, I think."

He can't blame her. It isn't only his sense of orientation. It seems that he didn't do much driving between the amputation and the onset of his amnesia, and he _knows_ that he's done none since then. Working the pedals with the prosthetic is not something he is practised in, and there was one memorable turn-off on the way that he exited on the right side instead of the left, prompting a yell of dismay from his passenger and the injunction to 'get the bloody car' back onto his side of the road.

He gets out, seeing the neighbourhood with her eyes - the overfilled garbage bins lining the road, the weedy front gardens, the battered cars lined up along the curb, the cracked pavement, the blistering paint on the window frames and doors. Signalling to her to follow, he walks up to the red-painted front door and unlocks it. The house is a terraced one, originally built for one family. Gavin kept the ground floor and the garden for himself and converted the first floor into a self-sufficient flat when his wife departed with the children. He goes upstairs, steadying himself with one hand on the banister, and lets her into his flat before Gavin can pop out of the downstairs door to muster her.

She walks in, looking around curiously. This time he doesn't bother to imagine what she's thinking. It's probably much the same as what he'd thought when he first saw the place. He's renting it fully furnished, including mismatched furniture, threadbare carpet, flower-patterned curtains and Peter Scott prints of Bewick swans on the walls. Not his style, but then, he hardly knows what his style is, and buying and lugging furniture up to the first floor was hardly an option when he moved in here those three years ago.

"I need a few minutes in the kitchen," he says. "Can I get you something to drink, Dr Cuddy?"

"I'm good." She hesitates. "And call me Lisa. Can I help?" She follows him into the kitchen where they'll have to eat - the flat is too small for him to have a dining area in the living room - and leans against the counter while he sprinkles walnuts and Asiago cheese over two plates of baby arugula.

"Voilà," he says, feeling more confident now that he is in his element, and gestures at the table. He decided against the candle in the bottle at the last moment, preferring to borrow some flowers from his landlord's garden. They look fresh in the centre of the table and less suggestive of a romantic dinner than a candle would have done. Altogether, he rather likes the casual atmosphere he has created. If his guest was expecting something fancier, she is too polite to show it.

The meal goes a lot better than he expected. His social skills, as one of his female acquaintances once took the trouble to point out, can probably be traced back to some marauding Viking ancestor, but Dr Lisa Cuddy, although used to the refined manners and polished talk of academia, seems to be amused at his wry tales of kitchen mishaps and culinary crises, and in turn does a very passable imitation of the cab driver who called her 'luv' and 'dearie'. There's a slight musical crisis at the beginning, when true to Gavin's advice he puts the Elton John CD into the stereo in the living room and turns up the volume so they can hear it in the kitchen. Lisa gives him the oddest look and picks up the CD cover.

"This isn't yours," she states with the same certainty that she showed regarding the Vauxhall Astra. "Where are your CDs?"

He doesn't answer, but his eyes slide involuntarily to the drawer where he keeps his collection. She sees the eye movement and goes there swiftly. Before he can stop her, she pulls it open and peers inside it. He closes his eyes in dread anticipation - the drawer also hosts his collection of porn DVDs. There's a loaded silence.

When he opens his eyes again, she's brandishing a modern jazz selection. "I think we can both live with this," she says. He takes the CD gratefully, ejects Elton John from the player and starts the one she chose. Judging by her indifferent mien, she didn't notice the recurring motif of his DVD collection.

When they're back in the kitchen and eating their salad, she says out of the blue, "You manage with _ten_ porn DVDs? Very modest."

Flushing, he almost chokes on his food, but when he looks back up at her there's an amused gleam in her eyes. She's playing with him, he realizes, deliberately ragging him when he thought the danger had passed. "I'm thinking of expanding my collection. Any suggestions?"

She smirks, but changes the topic. "What'll you do now that you've been fired?" she asks.

He shrugs. "Look for a new job. It shouldn't be difficult. There are dozens of hotels and restaurants in Bristol. Look at the bright side: if I hadn't got fired, I'd have had to work this evening."

She smiles at that. "True. And what would you have done tonight if I hadn't accepted your invitation?" she asks slightly provocatively.

"Oh, don't pride yourself on saving my evening. I'm missing _Spring Watch - the Tenth Anniversary_ because of you."

" _Spring Watch_? Is that some modern _Baywatch_ spin-off?" she asks.

He almost cracks up at the idea. "No, although the idea of the female presenter wearing a bikini is very attractive. It would liven up the programme. The BBC takes over a farm east of nowhere and spends three weeks trying to animate comatose wildlife into showing aggressive or libidinous behaviour. Once a day, at prime viewing time, the long-suffering public is subjected to the summary of the day's non-events. All we get to see is the presenters telling us what we _could_ be seeing if otters, beavers or nesting birds decided to perform for the cameras instead of doing their dirty deeds in the dark."

She gives him a doubtful look. "And that's what you would be watching if I wasn't here."

"Yep," he says happily. During _Spring Watch_ season Gavin comes up with fish and chips, he provides the beer, and they watch it together. Gavin's a wildlife aficionado of the worst kind, but his antique television can't compete with Pete's high definition flat screen. The first time he'd come to watch he'd pretended his television had just kicked the bucket, but now in their third year, their sessions have become a ritual. Gavin watches Spring Watch with true dedication to the cause of wildlife and unwavering loyalty, and Pete, for his part, watches it for the absurdity of Gavin's serious comments.

She suggests a break after the main course so she'll be able to do justice to the dessert, and she gets up automatically to help clear the table. Ignoring his protests, she runs water into the kitchen sink and starts on the dishes, tossing him a tea towel as if it were her kitchen, not his.

"Not bossy at all," he mutters.

"Oh, get over yourself. You hate doing the dishes, and I don't mind," she says.

He has to admit that it's oddly comfortable, working together in the kitchen with this near stranger as if they have always been doing it. She's certainly a lot more efficient than the trainees at the hotel, and she stacks the dishes the way he prefers them: not all higgledy-piggledy, but arrayed according to kind and size. Following up on _Spring Watch_ , they get involved in a debate on the quality of BBC television products, only coming to a truce of sorts over _Dr Who_. A short-lived truce.

"It broke my heart when the eleventh doctor left. Matt Smith was infinitely better than the guy who's playing the twelfth doctor," she says with typical female ignorance.

"The twelfth doctor," he proclaims, "is the best there ever was."

"Bullshit. He's a macho and a geek. It's bo-o-ring."

"Is not. You girls go hormonal over some imaginary vulnerability that you sense in the eleventh doctor when all there is, is immaturity and a crass lack of responsibility."

"But pulpifying aliens first and then asking if their intentions were friendly, that's responsible and mature, right?"

"It's realistic. Aliens are never friendly," he says with absolute certainty. "I wouldn't have thought you'd be the kind of person who watches _Dr Who_ ," he muses.

Her reaction is interesting - she avoids his gaze.

"You wouldn't watch it if it weren't for someone you watch it with," he surmises. "Your children. You have children." There, he's doing it again, getting her back up by prying in her life. She already looks miffed; now that he comes to think of it, she has said hardly anything about herself so far.

"A daughter," she says with visible reluctance.

Her reticence is provokingly mysterious. His experience with Americans to date is that during the brief course of a smoke on the roof terrace they'll have told him all about their divorce, their run-in with cancer and their grandchildren, complete with pictures of the latter brought out of the dark recesses of their wallets, and all this despite his obvious lack of interest as manifested by the ear-buds in his ears.

Perhaps he's just imagining it, or she's still smarting from the incident on the roof. Either way, a bit of interest in her spawn can't be wrong.

"Have you got a photo?" he enquires casually.

One eyebrow goes up, but she digs around in her purse, coming up with a passport-size photo of a girl about eight years old. Nothing special - brown hair like her, brown eyes, a wide grin. On the back of the photo it says, 'Rachel, Feb 2015'. He hunts around for an appropriate adjective.

"Nice," he says, realising as he says it that 'nice' is a lame adjective. He amends it to, "Cute kid." There, he's doing it again. He's noticed this before - when he's with Americans, he tends to mimic their accents and pick up their vocabulary after a relatively short time. His early years, his forgotten ones, must have been misspent watching American series on television.

" _Cute_ , huh?" she says. He looks up from the picture; judging by her tone, he must have got that _very_ wrong, that bit with the appropriate adjective. Giving him a measured gaze, she plucks the photo from his fingers. "Why don't you tell me what you want," she asks, "instead of beating around the bush? This is ludicrous."

His eyes slide to a spot on the wall a few inches left of her head. He is bust.

"Come on. You're not the type to consider kids _cute_. You want something, and it isn't sex. You haven't tried to hit on me, you've only given me an obligatory ogle or two, and you didn't even try to brush against me when you passed the food. So, what is it?"

"Your shampoo," he mouths hollowly. There, he's said it, and he can hear himself how batty it sounds.

Her eyes narrow. "What about it?"

"What brand do you use?"

She digs in her handbag again; for a fearful moment he thinks she's searching for her mobile to call a cab ... or the police. Instead, she pulls out a pen and a notepad on which she rapidly jots down a few words. Tearing the page off the notepad, she proffers it to him. "Satisfied?"

He looks at it. He's never heard of the brand, but he'll go shopping tomorrow. "Thanks," he says with real gratitude.

He can't blame her for looking at him rather critically. "So all this," her arm sweeps around to encompass the whole kitchen, "is about finding out what my hair smells like."

He scratches the side of his nose. "I enjoyed your company," he offers, phrasing it in the past tense, because he has a premonition that the evening is over, regardless of the mini apple pies keeping warm in the oven.

"You haven't gotten rid of me yet," she says grimly, sitting down again at the table. "What happened to the concept of dessert?"

His mouth quirks with relief. He's got what he wants, true enough, but he wasn't lying when he said he'd enjoyed having dinner with her. It's been a lot less stressful than evenings with women are as a rule, despite all the landmines he has to avoid. Perhaps he should try this more often, cooking for the women he wants to shag, instead of taking them out to the pub or the cinema. Except that he doesn't want to shag Lisa, and he can't really see himself spending a whole evening conversing casually with Sharon or Janet from reception or whoever. Maybe that's the problem - that he doesn't enjoy talking to the women he wants in his bed.

He brings out the pies, puts one each on a dessert plate, adds a generous dollop of ice cream to his, a slightly less generous dollop to hers, and places her plate in front of her with aplomb.

"So," she says, digging around in her pie with her spoon, "do you enjoy cooking? As a job, I mean."

"Yes," he answers. It isn't as though he has much of a choice in the matter, but that's beside the point. "Why not? It's not a bad job for a chap like me." Which is basically what he tells himself every day when he forces himself to go to work.

She stops eating to stare at him. "You're kidding!"

He's annoyed by the assumption that anything that's less stimulating than medicine must be below everyone's dignity. Just how, Miss High-and-Mighty, do you get a decent job when you are well over fifty and have no proof whatsoever that you have an education or formal training in any field? But that's something that he isn't likely to share with her, no matter how comfortable they were a few moments earlier, so instead he says, "I'm the best cook in Bristol. I won't have to beg for a new post - I'll be able to choose." Which is almost true. He'll be blackballed in Bristol, but there are other cities he can still try.

"Have you always been a cook?"

"About six months." He tries to keep to the truth as much as possible. It makes it easier to keep tabs on what he's telling people about himself.

"And before that?"

Perhaps he's overly sensitive, as he tends to be when people ask about his past, but he can't help feeling that she's interrogating him. "Oh, this and that; a jack-of-all-trades." It's his standard reply to questions about The Time Before. She's about to ask more, so he lists some of the things he's done over the past three years, "A stint in the electronics industry, some programming, the coroner's - I'm a bit of a shady character," he ends, flashing her his bad-boy smile that generally has women drooling all over him and shutting up about his past. She chooses to drool over the apple pie rather than him, but she gets the message and drops the subject.

"What's with the shampoo?" she asks instead.

He grimaces. His plans had included getting into her presence so that he could find out about her shampoo, but not what he'd say as an explanation if she did cooperate with him. "It reminds me of - the shampoo my mother used to use," he improvises. Her look indicates that she really, _really_ doesn't believe him, so he adds as a distraction, "I smelled it when you got in the lift yesterday. I was in there, too, but you didn't notice me."

_Brilliant_! he thinks the moment he's said it. Now she'll think he's been stalking her and using the shampoo as a blind, but that's better than having to explain the truth to her: that he has no memory, but has to rely on the odd olfactory flash for glimpses of his past, glimpses that never go beyond emotions or sensations, never concretise into images or recollections.

Rather surprisingly, she believes him, believes the complicated truth instead of going for the simple explanation that she's being hit on by a loopy creep. "You got yourself fired because of the smell of a shampoo in an elevator," she says, shaking her head in a mixture of amusement and disbelief. "I hope your _mother_ is worth it!" When she puts it like that, he can see the ludicrousness of the whole situation. Soon they're both laughing, their former rapport restored.

They remain seated, talking about more general topics for some time, and then, at her request, he calls her a cab. When it pulls up outside the house, he escorts her to the door of the flat. Before he opens it, he looks down at her for a moment, hesitating. He wants ...

"You want to smell my hair, don't you?" she asks.

"I ... yes," he admits, drawing a hand through his own sparse hair.

She smiles understandingly, taking a helpful step towards him as he leans down towards her. He puts a steadying hand behind her head and brings his face down into her hair carefully to avoid freaking her out. Yes, it's that same scent, and it's as good - no, even better - than he remembers it, because now he's getting a whole breath, not just a passing whiff. And it's that same warm, blissful feeling that he experienced in the lift, only much stronger, that feeling of cosiness, security, calm. Not the adrenaline rush that he gets from other familiar smells like leather and tarmac, or the nostalgic feeling that fresh magazine pages induce. Perhaps he wasn't that far off when he attributed the scent to his mother. He burrows in deeper, his other hand coming round to the small of her back, both hands pulling her in closer. Her hands come up to grip his shirt, whether to steady herself or whether to push him off somewhat, he can't tell. The nagging voice of common sense is telling him to let go of her and step back before Something Bad happens, but that voice, uncommonly faint from the outset, is fading away into the background ...


	5. A Short Rest

He surfaces slowly from the cocoon of sleep enveloping him, unwilling to leave its warmth and contentment. He's pleasantly relaxed, and a warm shape is bundled up against him, a warm, good-smelling body. That body, however, isn't quite as serene as he is. She's whimpering and murmuring in her sleep, her limbs twitching in agitation. It was probably one of those uncontrolled jerks that woke him in the first place. He moves his arm around her to pull her closer, hoping that his proximity will calm her - he's really too comfortable to want to deal with her dismay when she realises what she's done; time enough to deal with that in the sobering grey light of morning. Her unrest increases despite his tentative efforts that he augments with little caresses along her back and arm and noises that he hopes are akin to soothing growls. Judging by her increasing level of agitation, he's doing it all wrong.

"No!" she moans, "No! No, no!"

He freezes, even though he's reasonably sure that her negations aren't aimed at him. Then he gives her a gentle shake. "Wake up, Lisa."

Her eyes open and gaze around blankly. When they alight on him, she sits bolt upright gasping, "House!"

"Wake up!" he repeats, annoyance tempered with a twinge of guilt beginning to take hold of him. He should have known better, of course, than to go to bed with a woman who's been in some sort of abusive relationship. Still, it's bloody annoying and not his idea of two a.m. post-coital bliss.

She stares at him with widened eyes - he still isn't sure whether she has recognised him or knows where she is - before rolling out of bed and gathering up her clothes in frenetic haste. Gentleman that he is, he turns on the bedside lamp to facilitate her search; from what he can remember, neither of them exactly placed their clothes in a neat folded pile on their way to the bed. If she's grateful, she hides it well.

"Why did I do it?" she mutters darkly as she fastens her bra. "Why the _hell_ did I do it?"

There's an obvious answer to that question. "Sexual frustration - although starvation is more accurate in your case - leads to loss of inhibitions, culminating in spontaneous and frequently ill-judged mating choices."

She glares at him. "Starvation, huh? You don't know crap about my sex life!"

He recounts what he noticed earlier on, when her body's traitorous responses gave her away. (He'd have blabbed it out like an idiot right then and there and ruined all his chances of getting laid, but luckily sexual arousal tends to cut off the blood flow to his speech centre, so all he'd uttered had been formless grunts of satisfaction.) "You were totally wet, totally tight, which means: no sex in a while. And you orgasmed almost immediately when I touched you down there; much as I'd _like_ to take credit for that, a Rottweiler probably would have elicited the same response." He scrunches up his face. "Hmmm, not a nice image."

"You're an ass!"

He should have left out that Rottweiler bit, but she'd been angry before he opened his mouth, so tact probably would not have helped matters much. He leans back with his hands clasped behind his head, pondering why her feelings in this matter are a source of discomfort to him. It isn't the first time that bed affairs have ended badly with the lady in question stomping out in a rage; he's an unquenchable source of tactless and crude remarks once the endorphins wear off.

The thing is, he realises, that he's as much a victim as she; a victim of the brutal idiot who did whatever it was that makes her wake up shivering with fear. Her anger isn't directed against him, it's directed against herself for getting herself into a situation that triggers her nightmares. He ponders the likelihood of being able to get her to come back to bed, but she's unlikely to repeat the same mistake twice within a few hours, so he may as well not bother. It's not as though he'd be able to get it up again even if she came back to bed, but that's an eventuality that is becoming ever more unlikely with every article of clothing that she finds and dons.

Nevertheless, he can't help feeling miffed at her utter lack of compunction or tact in this matter. A bit more of, 'This was great, even though I need to go now,' and a bit less of, 'Jesus, this was a giant mistake!' would do no harm. After all, it isn't as though he was the only instigator of the process that ended in his bed or as though she didn't have any fun at all. Rather the opposite, if one asks him. He decides that a bit of messing with her head is quite in order, and utters the line that invariably flusters everyone he tries it out on.

"Is this because of ...?" He waves a hand at the spot where his leg used to be.

"This may come as a surprise, but the world doesn't revolve around your leg," she snaps.

She's fully dressed now, and she walks over to his bed, perching herself on its edge so she can look down at him. He half sits up to make up for the disadvantage of his recumbent posture, but she pushes him back with a fierce poke of her finger in his chest. "And don't try that 'poor old cripple' number on me." But her previous anger has evaporated, confirming his assessment that it had nothing to do with him and his multitudinous methods of fucking up his love life.

He leans back happily, delighted by her reaction. She's one of a rare breed that is immune to his manipulative use of others' guilt. Most women would have caved and stayed, just to prove that his stump didn't disgust them. She'd shown the same indifference to it earlier in the proceedings, when he'd tried to bat away the hand tugging his jeans down. (His preferred mode for sex is pulling his jeans and boxer shorts down just far enough that he can do the dirty deed without exposing his stump.)

"Don't be stupid!" she'd grunted. "I'm a doctor; I've seen amputations before. Get your jeans and that peg leg of yours off before you clobber me with it."

And she'd treated the gap in his anatomy with the same brutal disregard the rest of the night, a refreshing change to what he's used to by now. The women he's slept with so far (and the ones he hasn't) either treat it like the elephant in the room that it is, going to great lengths to ignore it, or (and this is the more frequent reaction) going to even greater lengths to reassure him that his disability does not impair his performance. He often wishes that they would treat the rest of his body with the same consideration that they show his non-existent limb.

Now she cups his cheek in her hand and contemplates his face for a moment before dropping a light kiss on the other cheek. Then she rises and goes to the door.

"Will I see you again?" he asks, hoping he doesn't come across as pathetic.

She stops and half turns in the doorway, and leaning against the jamb she gives the slightest shake with her head. "No. I have to present a paper tomorrow ... today, and I chair two workshops in the afternoon. After that I'm flying back home." She brushes her hair out of her face and gives him a lost smile. "Farewell, Pete."

He remembers something she said earlier. He can't help but ask, "What house?" She looks puzzled. "In your nightmare you shouted something about a house."

"Oh, that." She's looking at some point close to the tips of her toes. "That was ... that was my house. It collapsed a few years ago, during a storm."

"Wow!" he says. "A whole house collapsed on you?" She must be dogged by disaster - a violent partner _and_ a house collapse.

"Not the whole house," she answers, "only one room. And not on me." She gives the last word an odd emphasis, but before he can pry some more she pushes herself upright and goes.

* * *

He spends the next morning dropping in on different restaurants and hotels, but the going is tough, tougher than he'd thought it would be, literally and metaphorically. Now that he's aware of it, he notices how he uses all sorts of little tricks to remain oriented: he makes sure at least one bus stop is always in sight; he subconsciously shows a preference for establishments that lie close to locations he's familiar with; he keeps prominent landmarks in sight. In between appointments he detours to Boots to pick up the shampoo only to find that they don't stock it. He tries a more upbeat establishment, and finally a supplier of hair care products.

The girl at the counter checks on her computer.

"We don't have it, but I can order it for you, sir. 250 millilitres - that's about eight and a half ounces - will cost you roughly thirty pounds plus shipping charges."

Christ, what does the woman wash her hair with, liquid gold? "Thanks, but no." He can order it online himself and probably get it a sight cheaper. He's miffed though, having expected to be in possession of a bottle of bliss by lunchtime.

He phones the hotel in the early afternoon. Janet is so kind as to inform him that Dr Cuddy ordered a taxi to take her to the airport at 5 p.m. Yes, that's Bristol airport, she confirms.

Good! Heathrow Airport would be the likelier choice, as it is conveniently close and more flights by far leave from there, but he won't complain. He spends the rest of the afternoon at the computer - a new job can wait another day - finding out about Dr Lisa Cuddy. That small matter with the house bothers him. He wouldn't say she was lying, precisely, but she was definitely hiding something from him. Not that he expects instant openness from strangers, but there are certain topics - her daughter, for instance, or the matter of the collapsing house - that make her tense in a manner that seems unlike her and that neither topic justifies: most people are eager to talk about their misbegotten offspring, and a collapsing house is the sort of story that makes really good telling.

He finds her on the homepage of a teaching hospital in downtown Philadelphia, where she's listed as head of 'Family and Community Medicine'. Hardly a position that carries much weight, one would think, and he wonders from where she draws the assurance that she'll be the next dean. Surely the heads of the other departments - oncology, cardiology or what-have-you-ology - are more influential than she is. There's a link to her personal bio data, which is somewhat more conclusive. Undergraduate studies and medical school at the University of Michigan; he pauses to calculate her age and comes to the conclusion that she must be about forty-seven, so his estimate was good. Residency and fellowship in endocrinology accompanied by a sizeable number of publications (why isn't she in endocrinology anymore?) at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York. Then, dean of Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital in Princeton, New Jersey.

She was dean before this? That answers the question as to why she's so sure she'll become dean (again) in two years. It does, however, beg another question: why did she give up a prestigious post like that to go for, what was it, 'Family and Community Medicine'?

There's a gap of almost two years between her long stint of fifteen years at PPTH and the new job in Philadelphia, with no hint of what she was doing during that period. His first guess is maternity leave, but the child on the photo she showed him is too old for her to have taken maternity leave a mere four years ago. He has no second guess. Yet.

He takes the express link to the airport, which gets him there slightly early, so he settles down in the departure area with a magazine that he 'borrows' from WHSmith. About fifteen minutes later she arrives, striding confidently through the doors pulling a trolley suitcase, clad in a practical, severe trouser suit. She heads straight for a self-service kiosk and starts the check-in procedure, pausing to rummage in her handbag for her passport. He sneaks up behind her and leans over her, as much from a sense of mischief as from the desire to smell her hair again, but he's thwarted in the latter desire - she has used a different shampoo today. He knows that smell, too; it's the complimentary shampoo the Brunel keeps for guests. Disappointed, he draws upright, frowning at the back of her head. At that moment she turns around. She must have been aware of his presence, for she doesn't draw back in alarm - god, but he's an idiot to sneak up on someone with a traumatic stress disorder! - but leans back leisurely against the kiosk, smiling smugly up at him.

"Sorry," she says, "but I didn't want to risk a repeat of the scene at your door last night."

He's as much annoyed by her certainty that he'd turn up (unbidden) at the airport as at the insinuation that last night was mainly his doing. Is he that pathetic?

"Stop sulking, and I'll buy you a cup of coffee," she offers, not even waiting to see whether he's following her as she marches off. Still, since he's come all this way, he'd better take what he can get. He waits, leaning against a pillar, as she drops off her suitcase, and then he drags her off to the coffee shop where he orders the largest, sweetest, fattiest espresso drink on the menu with extra whipped cream and two cookies to boot. She rolls her eyes at his choice and doesn't order anything for herself. They sit down next to each other on seats just outside security.

"On a diet?" he asks provocatively.

"No. I want to sleep on the flight."

He waggles one of the cookies from which he's already taken a sizeable bite under her nose. "Those don't contain any caffeine."

She takes hold of his wrist to keep his hand still and takes a bite out of the cookie. "Not bad," she mumbles through a mouthful of crumbs. At his surprised look she adds, "Your tongue was down my throat last night, so I don't think we need to discuss hygiene issues here."

He gets the message: the more he provokes her, the more she'll hit back - below the belt by taking his food if necessary. He decides that she's a bitch, but she's an amusing one. They sit in comfortable silence, he eating and drinking, while she stares abstractedly into space, only checking on his progress every now and then.

When he's done she says, "I need to go through security." She digs through her handbag once more, now drawing out a plastic bottle that she thrusts at him. It has a pink bow tied around it, and he can smell from that distance what it is.

Dumbstruck, he takes the bottle from her hands and twists it round and round, flicking a thumb at the lid. No, he won't open it here and now and smell at it; that would _definitely_ be pathetic. He looks back at her; she's chewing uncertainly on her lower lip, unsure how to interpret his silence.

"It's still more than half-full," she offers.

"Thanks," he says awkwardly. "That's ... really nice of you." How do you thank someone for catering to your fetish, and a rather lame fetish at that? He leans over and gives her a peck on the cheek.

She gets up, pats his knee and says drily, "Have fun under the shower tonight." And with that she goes towards the security gate.

"Hey," he calls after her, brandishing the bottle, "you were very sure I'd turn up, weren't you?" The bottle is larger than the 100 ml security regulations will allow in hand luggage, so if he hadn't come, she'd have had to toss twenty pounds' worth of shampoo into the bin.

She turns round to face him, walking backwards a few steps, her face lighting up. "Oh, yes," she laughs. "You are nowhere near as broodily mysterious as you'd like to be." And with that she turns away again and rewards the undeserving security guard with a toothpaste-commercial smile.

* * *

_Princeton, August 2011_

_The wind moaned and howled; the beech tree out in front creaked in protest. Rain slapped on the sidewalk and on the roof. Somewhere at the back of the house a door rattled. Julia sighed. Uncurling from the couch she slipped into her house shoes and went to the kitchen to check the windows and the back door. When she switched on the kitchen light it flickered, as did all the other lights in the house._

_"Great!" Julia muttered, moving to the drawer in which Lisa kept a flashlight. It probably wasn't a question of_ whether _the lights would go off, but of_ when _they would do so and for how long. The flashlight was where it was supposed to be, as was a candle, but there were no matches. Julia paused, trying to remember where Lisa kept the matches since Rachel started pulling herself upright on the furniture. It would be close to the original spot, but higher up - there, the shelves next to the stove. Julia retrieved the matches and put all three items into the pocket of her dressing gown. Then she checked the back door. Yes, it rattled slightly when one tugged at it hard, as the wind was doing now, but it was solid and firmly locked. There was no way it would succumb to the destructive powers of Hurricane Irene, which was more than she was prepared to say about the darn beech tree on the sidewalk. Julia was no wimp, but the groans proceeding from its branches were making her somewhat jumpy._

_She checked the clock - one a.m. It was too late to call Rob and tell him she was getting the heebie-jeebies here. Maybe she could risk lying down and getting a few hours' sleep - there hadn't been as much as a squeak from Lisa since she'd taken her meds at eight, and Rachel wasn't due to wake till five or so. As she pondered the advisability of leaving her post in the living room, she heard a low moan from Lisa's room. Well, it had been too good to be true. She switched on the water kettle and got out a mug and a tea bag. She'd sleep this afternoon; Rob had promised to keep the kids off her back. She was lucky Rob was so supportive and understanding._

_Mom had said, "Don't encourage Lisa by spending_ _another_ _night with her at That Place! You're enabling her, and she's stubborn enough as it is. She should move out, get a new place with no memories attached to it, and put that phase of her life_ and _That Man out of her mind. It's no wonder she keeps having nightmares if she insists on staying there!"_

_Rob had said, "Yeah, sure, Lisa's being an obstinate idiot, but aren't we all - right, Arlene? Tonight is not a good night to be alone in a house like that, even if she wasn't suffering from panic attacks. She's your sister. If you're worried about her, go spend the night there. The kids and I will be fine here - one more night won't make any difference to us." And that despite the fact that Rob knew it wouldn't be the last night, not by a long stretch._

_Another moan came from Lisa's room, this one long and drawn out. The kettle boiled. Julia poured the water into her mug, took it and went out into the hall. Outside Lisa's room she paused, listening. It was quiet once more inside. She continued on to the living room and, picking up her book, curled up once more on the couch. But she'd scarcely found her place when the lights flickered once more, and then went out altogether._

_Julia closed her eyes in resignation. This was exactly the sort of crap that had to happen when Lisa was growing increasingly restless! It was odd how quiet the house seemed without electricity, without the steady hum of the refrigerator and the heating system. In contrast, the noises from outside, the raging wind, the rush of air along the eaves, the branches whipping and cracking, penetrated the confines of the house as though the walls were non-existent. This house, which had seemed sturdy enough at noon, now seemed fragile and vulnerable when caught in the eye of the hurricane._

_There was a resounding crunch from the beech outside and a crash from the pavement. Despite herself Julia jumped. It was just a branch breaking off, she told herself. A moment later, either as a reaction to the increased noise level from outside or as a result of the meds beginning to wear off, a long-drawn groan from Lisa's bedroom turned into a full-fledged wail._

_Julia cast aside the throw she'd drawn over herself, pulled the flashlight out of her dressing gown pocket and hurried to the bedroom. She opened the door carefully; sudden interruptions of her sleep when she was in that state generally put Lisa into a wide-open panic attack. With one hand over the flashlight so that it only emitted a gentle orange glow, she slipped inside and made her way to the bedside. Lisa was throwing herself around moaning. No intelligible words left her mouth, but from what she'd once said in a (rare) vulnerable moment, Julia had a pretty good idea what she was dreaming: in her dream the car,_ his _car (instead of stopping right in the hole it had made in the wall, its hood crushed completely and_ _him_ _trapped inside badly injured) would shoot through the dining room like a missile, stopping just short of the opposite wall. And then, as Lisa watched in horror from the doorway,_ _he'd_ _get out brandishing the hairbrush he'd come to return. If Julia let the dream get beyond_ _that_ _point, there was usually no return - in the dream, armed with the hairbrush, he was capable of reducing Lisa to a gibbering mess._

_Careful to keep the flashlight pointed at the floor, Julia sat down on the edge of the bed and put one hand tentatively on Lisa's shoulder. When that elicited no reaction, she tightened her grip and shook her gently._

_"Lisa, wake up!" she urged. "C'mon, wake up!"_

_"No, nooo," Lisa moaned._

_Julia shook more insistently. "Snap out of it, Lisa, it's a dream."_

_Suddenly Lisa shot upright in the bed, drawing in a frightened breath. "What ...?"_

_"It's okay, you were dreaming again," Julia said._

_Lisa stared at her wild-eyed, her breathing rapid and shallow._

_"Long, calm breaths, Lisa," Julia advised. "It's okay."_

_Lisa's breathing calmed somewhat, but her eyes flickered around the room. "Why's it so dark?"_

_"Lights went out," Julia said with a calmness that she didn't feel. "Hurricane Irene, remember? Are you okay?"_

_"Yeah." Lisa plucked at her blanket, avoiding Julia's eyes. "He ... had a sword, this time."_

_"A sword? Why would he have a sword?" Julia cast around for some way of defusing what was clearly turning into a major issue. Shouldn't the nightmares be getting less as time passed, instead of more, and worse? She opted for, "People don't have swords!" hoping that by pointing out the improbability of whatever scenario Lisa's subconscious was painting for her in vivid colours, she'd put a stop to it._

_"House_ has _a sword - a sabre, or something like that. He collects odd stuff."_

_"You've got a restraining order; the trial is next month; he'll be locked away for years!"_

_The latter was wishful thinking - he'd get two years if they were lucky - but Lucas, Lisa's other ex, was sanguine that he'd piss the prison authorities off so badly that he'd never be released early. "And there's no way he can get through two years or so in the slammer_ and _keep his big mouth shut, so chances are some other convict will throttle him," he'd added with a hint of vindictiveness under the top veneer of amused indifference._

_Julia was drawn out of her thoughts by Lisa drawing in another panicked breath. "What's that?" she gasped._

_Julia listened. The wind was louder, gustier than before - if that was possible -, and Lisa was right. There was another sound over and above that of the wind and the never-ending rain. "It's just that stupid old beech on the sidewalk," Julia decided. As a precaution she added, "It may come down tonight, but it's too far away to damage the house."_

_"No, not that! It's here, in the house!" Lisa was wide-eyed again, on the verge of a panic attack._

_"Lisa, there's nothing ...," Julia stopped short, hearing it too, now. It sounded like some animal scrabbling along the roof; a very heavy animal. Except that there was no way that anything, animal or human, could clamber along the outside of the house in this weather._

_Lisa's voice rose. "Julia, it's_ him _! He's gonna break in and get Rachel, he'll ...,"_

_"Lisa, snap out of it!" Julia barked, losing her calm too as a creaking that seemed to come from inside the house reached her ears. "He's_ not _here; there's no way a cripple with one leg - or anyone else, for that matter - could break in here in the midst of a hurricane!"_

_Then pandemonium broke loose - a tremor shook the building as a rumble, low at first, but increasing in pitch and volume, reverberated around the bedroom; Lisa stiffened and started screaming, short sharp screams that seemed dissociated from her body. Then came a crash, and another one, and over it all the hysterical screams of a three year old._

_"Shit, Rachel!" Julia muttered jumping up. Unwilling to abandon Lisa while she was in a full-blown panic attack but seriously worried about her niece, she shot out into the hall and ran towards Rachel's room at the further end, only to stop confused. Despite the dark she sensed something different - a moist smell, the dust of plaster in the air, the taste of grit on her tongue. Dimly she registered that the door to Rachel's bedroom was gone. Julia stared at the gaping hole where the door should be, at the heaps of rubble in the room, and at the night sky that was visible wherever dust didn't obscure her view._

_And Julia screamed, too._


	6. Fire and ...

He finds her on Facebook. After waiting the requisite number of days (a week, he thinks, is long enough to not appear openly stalker-ish), he friends her, and she follows suit a day later. He's kept wondering for another week whether it's just reciprocal politeness on her part, but then she sends him a message asking for his apple pie recipe. That's a smoke screen, obviously: his pies were good, but nothing extraordinary; she could find as good a recipe in any standard cookbook. But of course he obliges. Her reply, saying that the pies were much praised by the friend she'd invited to dinner - it's unclear whether the person is question is male or female and, as he tells himself, it's absolutely none of his business -, is embellished by a photo of her efforts. He responds by sending a link to an article about the aphrodisiac effects of almonds (which feature rather heavily in his recipe) and he tags a casual post script to his message that expresses the hope that there were no untoward incidents after dessert. The emoticon that accompanies her reply rolls its eyes, while she professes her relief that their one-night stand was to be _entirely_ attributed to food chemistry. At that he's tempted to send her a YouTube link to a house collapsing during a tornado, but he just about manages to suppress his baser instincts, sending her a link to his favourite 'medical' clip instead: a Swedish ad showing two ambulance drivers defibrillating a guy to death because they think the sound of the parktronic in their new ambulance is the guy flat-lining.

From then on their exchanges become casual, embellished by the odd link or media file, but while she's curious enough about what he's doing, she's still tight as a clam about her own private life - until she announces about six weeks after her departure that she is to be in London for a few days on a 'work-related' trip. Did he have time to meet her?

When the message pops up on his screen, he sits back to contemplate it. Yes, he would like to meet her, and if he doesn't have the time to meet her, he'll make the time. After all, what's getting sacked one more time in the greater scope of things? But what the heck can the head of 'Family and Community Health' be doing in England _again_ on work-related issues? Hospitals don't normally pay their employees to go gallivanting around half the globe unless there's a good reason. She isn't a noted specialist in any medical area that might require a consult, and she has no recent publications to her name. He checks out the medical conferences in the Greater London area for that week and draws a blank. Much as he'd like to flatter himself into believing that he's the reason for her visit, he's aware that a one-night stand with a cook is hardly likely to draw someone like her back over the ocean: she doesn't seem the kind to believe that at the age of forty-plus she's met the one true love of her life, her soul-mate, the one the stars predestined for her. Nor would she be likely to beat around the bush; if she was interested, she wouldn't resort to subterfuges such as work to justify her presence. That woman is hiding something, and doesn't he just want to find out what it is!

So he asks her when and where he should meet her, and goes up to London on the day. She meets him at the coach station, for which he's grateful because the thought of meandering around London with a _London A-Z_ trying to find her hotel does not appeal to him. She has a few sights that she insists she has to see, but luckily the queue outside Westminster Abbey convinces her that she can get as good an impression, if not a better one, of the main tourist attractions on the internet.

"What do you expect?" he grouses. "It's half-term and a Bank Holiday weekend. The whole of bloody England is here in London, _and_ half of Japan."

They take a ferry down the Thames towards Greenwich instead. Between Westminster and the Tower she's on the verge of falling overboard trying to get decent photos of all the sights, but after the Tower it's a bit calmer. He takes the opportunity to ask casually, "So what exactly are you doing in London?"

She leans back and stares out over the water. "Oh, it's a sort of get-together of people who are into community health care. An informal sort of thing; networking, you know, and all that," she says vaguely. She's lying.

"And your hospital foots the bill when you say you want to spend a few days in London, networking."

"Well, not the entire costs, but a large chunk. It's a good opportunity for them, too, to find out how community health care is done efficiently and at low cost in other countries." She's lying again.

"So ... you're not here to see _me_ ," he probes.

Her head swivels round, and she stares at him incredulously. "No!" Strikeout! "You're totally full of yourself, aren't you?"

"I asked you three questions and you lied in answer to all three of them. You're pretty mendacious, I'd say."

"You think you can tell when I'm lying? How?"

Interesting. She's stopped pretending to have told the truth in order to figure out how he can tell _when_ she's telling the truth. "Not sure," he says, "but there's something about the way you ... it's a mixture of your expression and the way you intone your sentences."

She shakes her head in little movements, her smile one of disbelief. "Naaah, you're full of it."

"Tell me three things about yourself: two that are true and one that is false. But slowly."

"Okay." She thinks for a moment before saying rather monotonously, "One, I was born in Boston. Two, I have a brother and a sister. Three, I lost my virginity when I was fifteen."

"Okay," he says, leaning with his back to the water, elbows propped against the railing. "You don't have a brother and a sister." He considers this, and then he adds, "Maybe one or the other, but not both."

"Oh, crap," she says, an admission of defeat.

"Absolutely!" he grins. "So, you're here to see me. Which means I'm going to get some tonight."

"No."

"No, what? As in, 'No, I'm not here to see you,' although we've already established that you lied about that, or, 'No, you're not getting any tonight, although I flew over three thousand miles to see you'?"

"I'm not sleeping with you."

This time she's not lying, and she remains adamant. When he drops her off at her hotel, she won't let him come in with her. He looks down at her, more confused than disgruntled.

"Are you some kind of religious nutter?" he asks. "You come all this way and then ..." He rolls his hand in a gesture indicating failure.

"Does it always have to be sex?" she returns. "Can't I just be interested in your well-being? I cost you your job the last time I was here."

"You're here because you feel guilty. Brilliant!" He looks up at the stars as though to blame them. "She has the sex of her life with me, and all she sees in me is an object of commiseration and charity." He rolls his eyes drolly, pretending to be hurt.

"I'll have you know that I've had a lot of sex in my life, and _your_ performance doesn't make it into the Top Ten."

"You know, that sort of remark can affect a man's virility."

"I'll prescribe you some of those blue pills. Now go!" She gives him a gentle shove in the back to propel him away. Then she adds as an afterthought, "Do you know how to get to the Underground from here? Straight down the road until you get to the second traffic light, and from there you'll find signs."

He reaches Bristol at midnight, tired, footsore and stump-sore (he isn't used to so much walking - he's more into swimming at the moment), and more than a little cheesed off. She's here because she feels sorry for him? That's all kinds of crazy, starting off with the time she's investing, ending with the cheddar she's laid out, and with a lot of why-not-have-sex-if-we-both-want-it in the middle. He's in two minds about going down to London again the next day to see her, but he knows his curiosity won't let him rest while her behaviour is such a complete mystery to him. So as a compromise, he goes in later than she expects him, making her wait for him at the coach station. He knows, even as he does it, that it defeats its own purpose: he gets less time to solve this mystery since she's due to leave in the afternoon, and she'll be mad at him for being late.

"You're an ass," she greets him.

"And you're playing with me," he says seriously.

She's surprised at such directness, he can see. She's silent for a moment, and then she says, "No."

"Pardon me if I see that differently," he says, unable to subdue his anger. He's had all night to think about this, and the more he thinks, the unhappier he is with the situation. "You come bulldozing into my life, expecting me to be at your beck and call, but you won't tell me what this is about. I don't know anything about you that one can't google and I have no idea why I've become your latest charity project, but I'm supposed to be duly grateful. This is like some modern re-write of _Great Expectations_ , but I've always thought that Pip was a wimp and a bloody fool to put up with other people's desire to patronise him without trying to figure out why."

She's angry now, too. "That's not quite how it was. _You_ followed me. _You_ invited me to your place. _You_ turned up at the airport. I _asked_ whether you could come and see me here; I didn't _demand_ that from you. If you don't want this, then that's fine." She swallows before she continues. "You can go any time. I won't try to stop you."

"Okay." He turns on his heel - it's not quite as impressive a gesture as he'd like it to be because his prosthetic doesn't lift as elegantly off the ground as the effect requires - and starts back the way they just came. (At least, he _hopes_ it's the way they just came ...)

He has only gone a few steps when she calls, "You remind me of someone."

He stops, but he doesn't turn round.

"Someone I used to know." She has followed him and is now right behind him. He turns round to face her. Damn his curiosity - he should really, really walk away. "He was brilliant, and witty, and ... and very, very sick." She isn't lying today.

"And he hurt you," he surmises. This must the abusing motherfucker she's talking about. "So now you're pursuing someone who reminds you of that asshole; going for the same 'type'. I'm sure that's completely in character for abuse victims - go right back and make the same mistake again - and wow! Am I flattered!"

She rears back as though he's slapped her when he didn't even go near her, her face pale with shock. He turns round and walks away again, _really_ walks away, for judging by her expression she isn't going to be following him any time soon.

This is a fucking sight worse than _Great Expectations_! At least the convict became Pip's benefactor because he saw Pip's potential. _He's_ being singled out for charity because he reminds Lisa of a criminal.

He walks around for two hours, at first to work off his frustration, and then because he's utterly lost, before he gives up and asks someone the way to the Underground. Then he rides out to the airport, paling when he realises what he has to deal with over there. (Five frigging huge terminals - bloody rabbit warrens!) But he has her flight number - she sent him her flight data before she arrived - and once more he swallows his pride and asks his way round to her check-in area. He doesn't see her anywhere, so he goes to the flight information desk and cons them ('my wife has forgotten her medication') into telling him that she has dropped off her baggage and has, in all probability, gone through security already. So he has her called out, and then he waits at the security gate, wondering whether she'll come back. She'll know it is he who had her called out.

She approaches slowly from the departure area, looking around for him, her face set. When she comes closer he can see that her eyes are swollen. He looks down at his feet so he won't have to see her expression when she spots him. When he looks up again, she's sweet-talking the security guard, nodding over at him. She's successful, of course; she could charm the pants off a polar bear. She comes out and walks up to him, looking up at him for a moment. He doesn't move, the apology he has prepared stuck somewhere in his throat.

"I've got to go back in," she says.

"Yeah."

She steps right up to him and draws him into a rough hug. His arms automatically come up around her, enveloping her in a tight embrace. They stand that way without moving until the security guard clears his throat behind her.

"Ma'am, it's the last call for your flight."

She withdraws from his embrace and turns away, not looking at him at all. The security guard gives him an apologetic shrug.

"Crying again. Well, you're lucky to have such a loving wife." At his basilisk stare the security guard amends, "Well, girlfriend, then - can't tell nowadays, can one? Me wife, she'd be _rejoicing_ to get away from me."

"Can't blame her," he says as he turns to go.


	7. ... and Water

The next time, another six weeks later, she doesn't pretend to any business in England, but baldly informs him that she'd like to come down and see him for a few days; was he agreeable to seeing her?

He messages back, "What's the deal here? Does it include sex?"

He knows it's crude, but honestly, this is the kind of set-up that includes all the disadvantages of a long-distance relationship without a single redeeming feature. The disadvantages of a long-distance _long-term_ relationship: she's projecting all her previous fucked-up relationships onto him, as though he was her partner these past twenty years and was responsible for each and every one of them, and there's bloody nothing he can do about it because he hardly sees her at all. Besides, he's not really interested in having anything with a woman as complicated as she is; she's the poster girl for perfectionism, feminist issues, career issues, feminist-career issues, food issues, security issues, religious tradition issues, etc., etc.

Her emoticon glowers at him, while her message reads, "I'm not having sex with you. Not again!"

He pastes an emoticon that's flipping the bird into his next message. "Where will you stay?"

If he isn't getting sex, she isn't getting his bed. He's not spending a few nights on the sofa with blue balls so she can assuage her guilt over that idiot of an abuser. He wonders what happened to the fellow. It must have been something dire if she's feeling guilty about it instead of angry or hurt, as she should be.

His laptop pings at him. "A friend has recommended a B&B. BTW, you haven't answered my question."

He reads through the last few messages again and has to hand it to her: she's either remarkably thick-skinned or remarkably persistent. Had she been any other woman, he'd have said she was remarkably dense, but he knows she's anything but that. He'd be flattered by so much dedication on her part - this is the second time she's flying across the big pond to see him - except that it's obvious that it has little to do with an objective appreciation of his positive features ( _what positive features were you thinking of, you cretin_!), but a lot with her tendency to obsess over someone and believe that her salvation somehow lies in his hands. Would she have put up with an abuser if she hadn't seen him through totally distorted goggles? Now she's transferring that behaviour pattern onto him, that's all. And it's causing all sorts of conflicts in her, because rationally she knows that what she's doing is stupid and she'll just get hurt again, which is why he feels sorry for her - but empathy really isn't his strong point, so he'd better tell her to go bother someone else ...

He stares at the answer he has just sent off: "Feel free to come."

What. The. Fuck? Has he gone completely crazy? Why the heck did he do that? She probably has a browser window with her flights open where she'll promptly have pressed the _Confirm_ button to finalise the booking, so there isn't much he can do now. _Oh, yes, you can. Un-invite her. If she cancels the flights now, she'll get a tidy sum back, and what do you care anyway?_ But he knows he'll do nothing of the sort.

He offers to pick her up from Heathrow, but she says she'll hire a car this time and drive down to Bristol. She reaches Friday afternoon, calling him to tell him she'll be over at his place after she has showered. He's been dithering the past week, wondering how to make it clear to her that he's perfectly fine with a non-relationship, no matter how he came across the last time she was here. She probably expects him to cook for her again, but that would conjure up images of their last meal together, which ended in the sheets. Wrong message - bad option. But what can they do together that doesn't convey a desire to get into her knickers or get involved in any other way? He has no idea what fellows do with 'girl' friends who are not girlfriends. Does he know anyone he could ask for advice, someone who does something of a non-romantic nature with women on a regular basis? He has no idea. Come to think of it, he has no one he can ask for advice, full stop. He meets up with a set of people regularly at a pub, but he'd never tell them enough about this 'thing' with Lisa for them to form any sort of opinion, much less ask for their advice.

The doorbell rings, and he realises he has no plan whatsoever. He lets her in, and she gives him a quick hug before stepping away. Then she presses something into his hand. It's a GPS device for runners. He quirks an eyebrow at her.

"I saw it and thought of you," she says. "Throw it away if you're too proud to use it."

She pretends not to care, but he can see she'd be hurt if he did that. He turns it over and presses its buttons experimentally. She walks along his bookshelves, browsing the odds and sods that he has collected there. It's the pickings of the charity bookshops along Whiteladies along with some heavier reading that he got cheap from students. Anthony Horowitz rubs shoulders with _Beowulf_ , medical textbooks share a shelf with porn magazines. He goes over to his laptop, googles the coordinates of his favourite jazz joint, enters them into the device and checks the display. Distance: four miles. The thing seems to work.

"Have you always been this disoriented?" she asks. She's leafing through a book, one of his medical texts on the brain. It's one from the University library that he 'forgot' to check out correctly; their security is rudimentary, and his need is greater than that of the students: they merely want to understand the brain, while he has a damaged one.

"What do you think?" he replies.

"I don't think so. If you had, you wouldn't be so ashamed of it and you'd have learned to compensate better."

He likes her skills of deduction, so he responds as honestly as he can. "Damage to the brain in the same accident that cost me my leg."

She replaces the book and leans against the bookshelf. "So what happened there?" she asks, nodding at the leg.

"Car accident. A head-on crash." It's the story he concocted early on; simple, so that he doesn't contradict himself in details at any point.

"Your spatial abilities were the only ones that were compromised?"

He can see that she considers this unlikely. She is, after all, a doctor, even if she mostly wipes snotty noses. Again, a half-truth is the simplest solution. He's never told anyone about his amnesia, not because he worries about negative consequences, but because he doesn't want to be regarded as a freak or, even worse, an object of pity. It's easy to cover it up, usually. He has enough general knowledge that his lack of personal background goes unnoticed. Besides, he doubts that he'd impart much about his past to others even if he knew about it, and it seems that others doubt it too, so no one has ever called him on his lack of history.

So he says, "Well, there was a bit of amnesia right after the accident; couldn't remember what happened, and I still can't, and I was pretty disoriented for some days, but it cleared up quickly."

"I see."

He needs to change the topic. "So what do you want to do?" he asks awkwardly. "Go out for a meal? Go to the cinema? Or the theatre?" The latter is an afterthought; he's never been to the theatre and has no idea what's on or whether it's possible to get tickets at such short notice.

"What do you normally do on nights off?"

"Watch telly. Or meet friends at a pub."

"Fine, let's do that."

He stares at her, trying to envision her mingling with Baz, John, Ellie and the rest of his crowd. The mind boggles.

"What? Ashamed of me?" she asks provocatively.

"No," he says quickly, "not at all." He picks up his keys. "Let's go."

At least his favourite joint is nothing to be ashamed of. It isn't one of those factory-like troughs where people come to get plastered after work, but an offbeat place in Clifton frequented by students and music aficionados. He'd found it in his second week in Bristol, following up on a poster about live jazz in the city. This was where he'd met the rest of his crowd: Baz, who got him the job at the Brunel after he'd lost his previous one at the coroner's office; Annabelle, Baz's girlfriend who works somewhere in management at the Brunel; John, who owns a small unprofitable bakery that sells organic produce; Ellie, a primary school teacher.

John and Ellie are already sitting at their regular table. Ellie is too polite to show her surprise, but John's jaw drops open when he sees them. One would think they'd never seen him with a woman before, although he's picked up the odd woman here and disappeared countless times with Sharon at closing time. So, he's never _arrived_ with a woman, but just because he never has, doesn't mean he can't.

"The codfish is John. That's Ellie." He jerks a thumb at his companion. "Lisa." Then he slumps down in a chair, infinitely grateful that no matter how curious the others are, there'll be no probing, crude comments or judgments until Lisa has left - _he_ holds the monopoly on embarrassing his friends in front of strangers. There's the usual round of pleased-to-meet-you's.

"How can one be _pleased_ to meet someone one didn't expect to meet or look forward to meeting, and to whom one may take an intense dislike within ten minutes?"

John, who is a good enough chap, but not up to following his convoluted thoughts, asks blankly, "Why should I take a dislike to her?"

"Are you such an incurable optimist that you assume the best outcome regardless of previous experiences or do you simply lack the foresight to anticipate probable developments?"

"God, you're a bundle of joy today," Ellie mutters.

He _is_ feeling slightly edgy, but given the circumstances that's hardly surprising. It's only a question of time before Lisa and he are at each other's throats again, and his anticipation of probable developments tells him that this will in all likelihood happen before closing time, which means it'll be witnessed by the lads and be food for anecdotes till the end of time.

John has lost the plot completely. "'Pleased to meet you!' is just a figure of speech, a greeting," he says, flustered.

"So you're _not_ pleased to meet her."

"Ignore him," Lisa advises. "It's his weird way of marking his territory."

John opts for a strategy of polite retreat. "My round," he says. "The usual?" Turning to Lisa, he asks, "What would you like?"

"Whatever you recommend. But," she scans the neighbouring tables, "in a small glass."

While John is gone, a band gets ready on a small stage at one end of the room. Their average age seems to be around twenty.

"Oh, Christ, a bloody student band," Ellie grouses, rolling her eyes.

John, coming back with the drinks, places a half-pint in front of Lisa, saying, "It's a bitter from an organic brewery near Gloucester. Local produce."

Great! A student band _and_ unpalatable beer - the place is ganging up to disgrace him. But Lisa, ploughing her way valiantly through her tepid dishwater, is soon immersed in a discussion with John on the advisability of buying organic produce sold by mainstream supermarkets. He relaxes slightly and leans back to listen to the music. Ellie and he agree that the bassist is mediocre and the saxophonist should be shot. Opinions are divided along gender lines on the lead singer, who croons in a sultry, bluesy voice, and on the pianist. Ellie, with typical female blindness to the visual components of a live act, won't concede that a great bust and long legs embellish a singer's natural talent rather than detract from it. He accuses Ellie of reverse sexism - denying women who are more attractive than she is the right to talent - while she insists that he listens to music with his prick. (Although he doesn't admit it, he feels she may have a point when she declares that covering Janis Joplin is not a good idea if one has a voice like Paul McCartney.) Conversely, she is fascinated by the piano player's dreamy, abstracted expression - a sign, she says, of his absorption in the music.

"Bollocks! It's all show, and it appeals to your mothering instincts that are on the lookout for men who are likely to form an emotional bond with their offspring. Your fallacy lies in interpreting his grimaces at the instrument as a sign of heightened sensitivity."

"Just because you play with a dirty grin plastered all over your stupid face ..."

"Children, stop fighting!" John admonishes. "What's Lisa going to think of us?"

Lisa moves on smoothly from John and wholegrain bread to Ellie and literacy skills. When Baz and Annabelle wend their way to the table she's listening to Ellie's opinion on phonetic reading programmes. Baz, who is no one's fool, tips his head at Lisa.

"Wasn't she dining at the Brunel the evening you got canned? Didn't you force your gravy on her?" he asks _sotto voce_.

"Yep," he answers tersely.

Baz sighs. "Oh, brilliant!"

There are now enough people at the table that no one notices or cares whether he joins in the conversation. He leans back, nursing his pint, listening with half an ear to the music and watching Lisa making small talk withhis friends. She goes to get the second round - a gesture that meets with unalloyed approval -, compliments Annabelle on her self-made jewellery, and listens to Baz's anecdotes about troublesome underlings that, unsurprisingly, feature Pete in a leading role.

Lisa counters with an anecdote of her own. "I once had an employee who cost my hospital 100 million dollars." There's a general gasp of disbelief. "He refused to hold a ten-minute eulogy on our biggest donor's latest pharmaceutical innovation. The donor withdrew his money. End of story. Oh, yeah, no new paediatrics ward."

"Did you sack him?" John asks, his voice hushed in awe.

She shrugs. "Couldn't do it: he was right - the product sucked." She gives Pete a side glance that he can't quite interpret.

He feels vindicated. "See?" he crows, aiming an accusing glare at Baz. " _That's_ fair play; _that's_ justice! But although my sauces are perfect, I get sacked because some malcontent complains."

There's general laughter, while Baz tries to defend the hotel's hiring and firing practices.

"It explains how you manage to put up with him if you're used to rebels," Annabelle says to Lisa.

Lisa flushes and glances over at him. "Oh, we're not an item."

He keeps his face impassive - _he_ never suggested to anyone that they were. Baz, who overhears Lisa's reply, looks politely incredulous.

Later, while Lisa is absorbed in Annabelle's list of _Bristol Sights That Must Be Seen_ , Baz leans towards him. "Sharon is going to fry your testicles."

This is the kind of convoluted fuck-up that he tries to avoid. _This_ is why he stays away from relationships. "I'm not doing anything, am I?" he says. "Is she working tonight?"

"Yes." Baz, who got the third round, tips his head towards the bar. "Don't look," he hisses. "I'll bet she's fuming already, and ... oh, shit!"

He cranes his neck, finally spotting Sharon behind the bar where she's drying glasses. Their eyes meet, and Sharon drops the tea towel, dries her hands and comes out from behind the bar. He has a bad feeling, a _very_ bad feeling about this; there's going to be some sort of giant misunderstanding, and he'll get the blame. He has a few moments of reprieve as she winds her way between the tables along her route, replying good naturedly to greetings and warding off unwanted attention, for Sharon, with her alabaster complexion, thick auburn hair and voluptuous figure is a balm for sore eyes and a general favourite among the regulars.

When she reaches their table, she greets everyone in general with a, "Hey there, everything alright?"

There's a general murmur of assent, but the atmosphere is instantly tense. Annabelle and Baz are sending worried glances in his direction, John is fidgeting around trying to look nonchalantly at no one in particular, and Ellie is scowling even harder than usual. How come everyone but he saw this coming? He risks a side glance at Lisa; she has noticed the change in the atmosphere and is mustering the newcomer with interest.

Sharon walks casually round the table to the gap between him and Baz, leans over and kisses him on the side of the mouth. Then she straightens, placing a possessive hand on his shoulder, and says, "Hello, darling."

She never calls him darling. And she never singles him out among the guests with such a public display of - whatever. When they _do_ start something here, it's never more than subtle exchanges - she'll spend some time at his table, maybe she'll place a hand on his arm in the heat of the discussion and leave it lingering there longer than necessary, or he'll let his hand trail down her hip casually when she gets up to go back behind the bar. And then, after closing time, he'll be waiting outside for her when she's finished cleaning up. That's how it works. Everyone knows what's going on, but it's nothing that anyone who isn't sitting at their table would necessarily notice.

Sharon looks over at Lisa, a challenge that is barely disguised as polite curiosity. "Haven't seen you here with this lot before. I hope you're having a good time."

Lisa still has the look of interest on her face, and one has to be aware of her body language to notice the subtle changes - the slightly more upright posture, the tensing of the neck tendons, the smoothing of the crinkles around her eyes as her smile fades away from them until it is confined solely to her lips. She rests her chin on her hand as she musters Sharon. Then she says curtly, "You can have him. I don't want him."

His brain splits into three separate entities. One part is completely useless, a gibbering bundle at the immensity of this cataclysm. Another is clapping wild applause at Lisa's nerve: everyone at the table is shock-frozen, including the overt victor of this battle, Sharon. The third part is wincing with hurt.

Sharon is stuttering, "I'm s-sorry, I don't think I ... I understood you."

"I think you understood perfectly. He's all yours." Obviously, Lisa didn't get to her current career position by allowing anyone to walk all over her.

The first part of his brain takes up its duties again, and the second gives the third part a good shake. This is better than mud-wrestling on telly because it's 100% real, none of it rigged. A lot of similes from the animal kingdom spring to mind for the present situation; unfortunately, none of them bode well for Sharon. So, although he still can't quite fathom why _he's_ being held responsible for this bitch fight - everyone, but simply _everyone_ at the table is rolling their eyes at him - he gets up and takes hold of Sharon's elbow.

"Let's take this outside," he says, steering her past the tables to the back exit. Regulars at the other tables, who saw the kiss but didn't hear the exchange between Sharon and Lisa, hoot or make ribald comments.

Outside, he takes out his fags and lights one. Sharon leans against the wall of the pub, her arms folded over her chest.

"So what the hell was that about?" he asks.

"You bring a slag here, right under my nose, and you ask what this is about?" They've hardly started talking, and she's yelling already.

"So? You don't own me."

"This isn't about 'owning' you. We're in a fucking relationship! That's got to mean _something_."

He can't help himself: "Yes we're in a 'fucking' relationship; we fuck whenever it suits us. But that's about it."

She stares at him indignantly, incredulously. "Is that what it means to you?"

He's more than a bit confused now, though he tries not to show it. "Oh, come along. You know I pick up other women, and I'm sure you pick up other men when I'm not around."

"No, I don't!" she denies quickly, adding, "Not for some time now."

"Okay, but you _know_ I have other women. So why this fuss _now_?"

"Normally you're discreet about it. This time you're rubbing it in, aren't you, dangling her under my nose!"

"Discreet?" That isn't exactly a term he'd apply to himself. "I've never made a secret of it."

She scrapes one foot along the ground, mustering her toes. "You never do it when I'm around."

"Yeah, right, as though you wouldn't hear about it when I do it in the pub you work in, where your stand-in or one of the regulars is bound to tell you right the next day."

She shrugs at that, still not meeting his eyes. "That's just gossip then, innit? I can ignore that."

"Even when you know it's true?"

She doesn't answer. He leans back against the wall himself, tiredly closing his eyes. He can see now how this whole mess came about. Yes, he only hits on other women when Sharon isn't working here, but she's confusing cause and effect: when he feels horny and Sharon is here, he takes her home because it's less of a bother. She's almost always willing, and it's a lot less of a hassle than chatting up a stranger. It's also undeniable that he's been as good as 'faithful' to Sharon lately, but that isn't a symptom of settling down on his part. No, it's pure convenience - sex with strangers means initiating them into the mystery that is his leg at some 'appropriate' moment between coming to a mutual understanding about hitting the sheets and the actual act itself. Usually he emphasises the slight unevenness of his gait when they leave the pub, and with a bit of luck his companion will ask about it, but it's an exercise in self-revelation that he increasingly shuns. Lately he mostly opts to wait until Sharon is available to get his rocks off.

He tries again. "You're saying it's okay for me to fuck another woman if you can ignore it, but it isn't okay for me to bring a woman here that I'm not even having sex with."

"Aw, come along! Not shagging that dish?"

"I slept with her once, about three months ago. That was it."

"This isn't about how _often_ you shag her."

He's totally confused again.

"Look," Sharon says, straightening and looking him straight in the eye, "you've never been the companionable or the romantic kind, and that was okay with me. I've never minded that you don't pay compliments or show appreciation or even spend any time with me. I thought it wasn't your nature, that you were the reserved type."

"I am," he can't help interjecting, and it's only half meant as a joke.

"No, you're not, not the way I thought. You've been observing her half the evening like ... like some obsessive parent whose child won a school prize. You're proud as punch to have her next to you. The way you look at her and treat her - you never look at me like that. Now that I know you can treat a woman like that, I ... I feel like a whore."

He can't blame her. Seen from a certain angle, he's been treating her like one. There's no sense in continuing this conversation; he can't reassure her by telling her that he loves her or that she is 'the one', so he turns to go back inside.

"Why her?" Sharon almost wails. "She's old, and she's no better-looking than I am."

"I have no idea," he says truthfully.

"Is it because she's clever, and successful, and classy? You think you're better than us, don't you? You know more than we do and you can use complicated words and you can argue people right into the ground, but you're no better than we are. You're just a cook, like Baz. You're _less_ than Baz or than me - you can't even hold down a job. You think she's your passport out of here - you're even talking like her, with that American accent -, but you're fooling yourself! She's just slumming, and when she's had enough of us, she'll return to her upper-class life in America and tell her friends about the 'quaint English working-class'." She draws the back of her hand over her eyes, and practically runs inside.

He smokes another cigarette, and then he goes back inside too. Lisa, unsurprisingly, has left. The others look at him expectantly, but he just shrugs as he slides back into his seat. Baz, spokesman in awkward moments, says, "Lisa apologised for the scene. She said she was sorry she had caused stress between you and your girlfriend, and that it would be better for her to leave."

Again, he shrugs, as though to indicate that it doesn't matter to him either way. He stays until closing time as a matter of principle; anything other than that would give rise to comments and speculation. But seldom has he been so happy to hear the words, "Last orders, please."

* * *

He starts the next morning off with a swim in the university pool that is empty enough at this hour to not make him too self-conscious about his stump. As he towels himself dry afterwards, he wonders what to do with his day. He's taken the next two days off to have time to spend with Lisa, but after last night ...

After _what_ exactly last night, he asks himself. Sharon may have reason to be mad at him, but Lisa has no cause to complain. She isn't his girlfriend, and she said herself that she didn't want him. It's not his fault if she felt awkward after her mud-slinging contest with Sharon, but there's no reason why he should let a perfectly good weekend go to waste.

Outside, he reaches for his mobile. "Pete," he says when she answers her phone. "Any plans for today?"

There's complete silence at the other end. Then: "What about your girlfriend? Did she leave your balls on?" She sounds as though she'd prefer them pickled in brine.

"I don't see how my personal relationships concern you. You've made your lack of interest clear," he says with relish.

"You're hurt," she surmises quietly. That's so ridiculous that he's left speechless. By the time he has thought of a suitable retort, she's talking again. "I don't want to interfere or get in the way or open the door for further misunderstandings," she says in a tone that tells him she's truly bothered by what transpired last night.

"You mean you want to avoid the blame for wrecking my relationship. You needn't feel guilty; I'm capable of taking the responsibility for my actions."

That knocks the sentimental note right out of her voice again. "Oh, don't you worry - I have no intention of flagellating myself just because you behaved like a bastard to that poor girl. But now that I know she exists, I see no need to increase her undoubted suffering for the sake of a few of hours of dubious entertainment." She sighs, and then she adds in a gentler tone, "Be sensible about this: I'll be back in the States in two days, but you'll have to stay and deal with the fall-out. You've got a _good_ thing there - I'm sure she's a wonderful person. Why jeopardise that?"

"She - isn't my girlfriend," he admits. As he says it he can hear for himself how improbable, how _convenient_ that sounds. Had he started the conversation differently, saying for instance, 'Hey, this is Pete. I think you may have misunderstood the situation last night - Sharon is not my girlfriend. She's merely a deluded stalker,' or something to that effect, he might have stood a chance.

Lisa, however, is not only an unquenchable fount of guilt, but also amazingly gullible. Her tone is reprimanding but not disbelieving as she says, "You had me fooled there - and her, too!"

He draws a weary hand over his eyes. "Yep, apparently."

Out of nowhere she says, "Annabelle says the harbour is worth seeing, and the _ss Great Britain_."

"Forget it - I'm not clambering around an old rusty wreck." He's seen pictures of the museum ship with its steep narrow stairwells, and he knows he'll have difficulties navigating those.

"Fine! Then you suggest something better!"

"Harbour it is, but with style," he promises rashly. He makes a few quick calculations in his head. "Can you find the Castle Park ferry landing?" It's fairly quiet there, away from the main ferry routes. "Be there at noon."

"Noon? That's ... you wake me at this time so we can meet at _noon_?"

"Can't wait to see me, huh? Style takes time, okay?"

"Fine, noon it is."

Three hours is cutting it tight, but it's feasible. He anticipated having to feed her sometime this weekend, so his fridge is stocked, and he soon has a decent picnic packed. He has no picnic hamper, so it all has to go into his backpack. Now all he needs is a boat. He'd like a small sailing yacht, nothing too fancy. It's somewhat more difficult than he anticipated - the weather is lovely, the jetties are heavily frequented, and the ones that aren't so crowded that his presence would be immediately noted and questioned are surrounded by fences higher than his leg will allow him to surmount.

Lisa is waiting at the ferry landing dangling her feet off the edge when he arrives with his prize at a quarter past twelve. She quirks an eyebrow at the rowing dinghy, saying, "Style, huh?"

"Size," he says with dignity, "isn't all that counts. It's also about performance, endurance, reliability."

"We're still talking about boats here?"

"Get your mind out of the gutter!" he says, stretching out a hand to help her on board.

A rowing boat wasn't quite what he'd envisaged, but at least he can row. He wasn't sure, really, whether he'd ever done it before, but the moment he was in the boat, he'd known what to do and how to do it. And finding the ferry landing with the help of the GPS device had been a breeze. It occurs to him, as they potter along the harbour, that he's been avoiding unknown places for ages now, confining himself to known routes, and that the reason that he hasn't tried to take up running may not be the quality of his prosthetic, but his fear of getting lost.

Lisa is riveted by everything: the tacky city centre area, the converted warehouses, the _ss Great Britain_ ('It's not rusty, you mendacious bastard - it looks wonderful!') and the _Matthew_ , the brightly painted houses meandering up the hillside next to rows of red-brick Victorian houses, the crescents of white Georgian facades further up. He rows strongly, enjoying the exertion of muscles he doesn't normally need, filled with a mix of dread and joyful anticipation at the thought of the muscle pains awaiting him tomorrow.

After they've rowed around the harbour for a bit, he finds a quiet spot for their picnic.

She trails her hand in the water and yawns. "This is great!"

"Jet lag works the other way round," he points out. "You're supposed to be wide awake till three a.m."

"I'm missing about eight hours' sleep," she argues. "I hardly got any on the flight, last night I _was_ wide awake till about three, and this morning you woke me at an ungodly hour."

"Eight-thirty is ungodly for you?"

"That was three-thirty in the morning by _my_ inner clock."

"One night of sleep - what's that to a doctor who has to do night shift, be on call, etc.?"

"That's _one and a half_ nights for me, as department head I don't do night shifts anymore, and I'm too old to be able miss out on so much sleep and just keep going like nothing happened."

"True," he agrees. "You've got nasty bags under your eyes." She splashes him with water, he splashes her back, and soon they're both wet and awake.

When the light begins to fade he puts her down near the city centre. "I need about an hour to bring the boat back and get back. Do you want to catch a bite somewhere? I'll need to take a shower first, though."

"Okay, I'll meet you at your place in about two hours."

* * *

Other people can recall childhood holidays with the family, their first school day, graduation, their first job, falling in love, their first time, and so on. He has no such memories to fall back on; his life is crammed into three short uneventful years. Seen from that perspective a night in the nick isn't necessarily a disgrace or a calamity, but rather, an edifying experience that widens his horizon. It leaves a lot to be desired as far as the level of comfort goes, but it's quiet and peaceful - until the night wears on and his hosts start escorting binge drinkers and the like into the cell he's occupying. His remonstrance falls on deaf ears.

"Should'a thought of that before you took that boat, shouldn't you?" he's told.

Around midnight - one of the teens in his cell has just puked violently all over the floor - a constable appears.

"Peter Barnes? - Oh, Christ, someone get a mop over here! - You're being picked up. By your mum."

He has no idea what this is about, but he's prepared to go anywhere that'll get him away from those idiotic kids. Lisa is waiting at the front desk, dressed in one of her trouser suits and with a touch of make-up to show that she means business.

The constable stops in his tracks. "You're his _mother_ , ma'am?"

"I didn't say I was his mother," Lisa answers testily. "I said I was keeping an eye on him."

The constable opens his case book. "Apprehended while stealing a dinghy."

"I wasn't stealing it; I was _returning_ it. Which makes it _borrowing_ , not stealing, as I tried to explain to your colleague."

"By calling him a ..." The constable glances down at the case book. "A 'thick pencil-pusher', is that right?"

"Officer, he gets grumpy when he's tired and his blood sugar level drops," Lisa interposes. He shoots her a glare. "He's going to apologise for that."

"I am?"

"You are," she says with iron determination. He presses his lips shut tight, like a four year old. "Hou- ," she starts, then stops short. "Peter, it's past midnight and I'm dead on my feet; just apologise and get it over with."

"Okay, I apologise for calling the other constable a thick pencil-pusher," he says. "What I _really_ meant was ..."

"No!" She yanks him back sharply by his T-shirt.

The constable's mouth twitches. "Alright, ma'am, take him home and keep _two_ eyes on him from now on, not just one."

Lisa puts a hand on the small of his back and propels him out of the doors before he has a chance to smartass his way back into a cell, heaving a sigh of relief when they get outside into the crisp night air. She digs a car key out of her handbag, and a car parked in the no-parking zone in front of the police station lights up. They get in, and she starts the car, driving it briskly up the hill. The silence in the car is only broken by the monotonous voice of the Satnav. He supposes he ought to thank her for getting him out of jail.

"How'd you find me?" he finally asks, wondering how mad she is at him.

She chuckles. It doesn't sound mad at all. "Figuring out what had happened wasn't too difficult. It was finding out _where_ you were that took some time. I called about five different police stations till I had the right one. You're an ass, you know," she adds without rancour. "You could have called."

"Thought I'd save my phone call for my lawyer." He hadn't asked whether he was allowed to make a phone call, because he'd had no intention of letting her know that he'd been banged up.

When the car draws up in front of his house, she gets out and follows him upstairs without waiting for an invitation. He opens the door to his flat, drops his keys into the bowl on the dresser in the hall, and goes through the living room into the kitchen without waiting to see if she's coming inside. He gets a beer from the fridge and returns to the living room, throwing himself onto the sofa and switching on the television. He can hear Lisa rooting around in the kitchen. She comes in ten minutes later with a beer of her own and a plate piled high with sandwiches. She sits down next to him.

"The 'meaty' ones are here," she says, pointing to the side of the plate that she has turned towards him.

He flips the top slice of toast up to inspect the contents: roast ham, slices of cheddar, lettuce, onion, some sort of dressing. Good; nothing he doesn't like, and a lot of stuff he likes. She's got wimpy stuff like cucumber and tomato on hers. After a few bites his annoyance at her for coming to his rescue ebbs, leaving room for appreciation at the calm with which she handles his delinquent tendencies. They sit in companionable silence, eating, drinking and watching the BBC's late night offerings, old Blackadder episodes. He's sure he has seen them before, but he can't remember when, so it must have been in his old life. He wonders whether it might be worth it to analyse his knowledge of television programmes in order to trace his past; he has noticed that he has some significant gaps in his knowledge base with regard to children's programmes that most of his peers seem to know. He also remembers being confused initially by some of the television programmes that are now part of his staple diet, whereas others, like _Dr Who_ , seemed like old friends right from the start. Right at the beginning, knowing that he was suffering from amnesia and not quite sure yet which areas of his memory were affected, he hadn't thought it odd. Now he wonders whether he could have been living outside Britain for a considerable period of time during his childhood and later again as a grown-up.

He also ponders what Sharon mentioned as an aside in her rant yesterday: the more time he spends with Lisa, the more he speaks like her. It isn't only his accent which changes, it's his entire vocabulary. It _could_ , in theory, be his mad linguistic skillz that turn him into a veritable speech chameleon, but he hasn't noticed this effect when talking to colleagues from India, Ireland or the Caribbean.

He turns to Lisa to ask about television programmes in America dating back four to five years, but she's asleep, her head tipped against the back of the sofa, her mouth open. The position looks uncomfortable, or so he tells himself, and he's going to end up with drool all over the backrest, so he reaches out and pulls her gently onto his lap, half turning her into him. She opens her eyes blearily, but closes them and cuddles into him when she realizes what's going on. As soon as she has settled, he goes back to the television programme and his musings, his brain tired but unable to find rest.

Two hours later he needs the bathroom. He tries to move Lisa off his lap without waking her, but she snorts into his T-shirt. It sounds like, 'God, house.'

Oh no, not _that_ again!

"The house is fine. You're in my flat," he says. "You're safe," he adds as an afterthought, holding her slightly tighter. She isn't tense, though, nor does she seem to be panicking. She opens her eyes and looks up into his face. He holds her clasped a moment longer, examining her mien closely for signs of anxiety or panic attacks, but there's nothing. Instead, she smiles and raises a hand to his face, cupping his cheek. His hesitation is of short duration; he lowers his head to kiss her. The moment she realises his intention she draws back and sits up; it is only by pulling back that he avoids having his teeth knocked out by her head.

He watches her straighten and put a little distance between herself and him. She draws her fingers through the tangles in her hair, avoiding his gaze, her breathing laboured. "I should go."

"You know, you're sending out very mixed signals," he says conversationally. "On the one hand you insist that this isn't a relationship. You won't have sex, and you're using a different shampoo - to avoid setting me off, I assume. On the other hand, you come over specifically to see me, you spend whole days with me, and now you're practically all over me. That sort of thing can confuse a chap."

"I'm sorry," she says, rubbing a hand over her face.

"That's not an explanation. It's just lame. An apology doesn't get me anywhere."

"Okay." She picks at imaginary lint on her trousers. "I like you."

"That's lame, too. I like steak, but I wouldn't travel four thousand miles to eat one."

She puts a hand on his arm and looks up at him earnestly. "We wouldn't work. We'd hurt each other."

He draws back slightly. "Then why are you here? Why are you investing this much time? You're a woman whose days are perpetually too short for her tight schedule, yet you're wasting an average of two days a month on me, a guy who you say will hurt you."

"Whom I will hurt," she corrects.

"Right. How many guys' hearts have you broken in your life?"

The question is meant rhetorically, but she considers it seriously. "Three," she answers, "but one - one never got over it. I don't need that again."

He has no doubt that she's talking about the man who still gives her nightmares. She's unbelievably obtuse for such an intelligent woman - she's blaming herself for whatever he did to her and to himself, instead of accepting that while she may have been the catalyst for his actions, his _deeds_ are entirely on himself.

"Let me see whether I got this right: you have made a vow of chastity and celibacy because some moron couldn't get over himself."

"No. I have decided to keep my life simple. I have a career and a daughter." She hesitates for a moment, before continuing, "A challenging daughter. The guys I date tend to be challenging too. At the moment it's too much for me."

"So you come here and play around with me for a while," he rolls his hand in illustration, "because you know that if things get out of hand, you can hop on a plane and put an ocean between us. You get all the advantages of dating - what did you call it - a 'challenging' guy with none of the risks. Doesn't explain the chastity, though."

She bites her lip. "I come here because I worry about you."

If she'd been trying for a turn-off she couldn't have done better. He feels like a seven year old. "Don't worry - I'm doing fine."

She raises her eyebrows at him. "Getting fired? Getting busted?"

"Both because of you," he points out.

"Great!" she mutters. "Go ahead, blame me!" She stands up and picks up her handbag. "I'm going."

He doesn't bother to rise. Instead, he taps his cheek with a demanding finger and tips his head expectantly. Huffing, she leans down and plants a peck on his cheek.

"You're impossible!" she grouses.

He switches channels. "When are you picking me up tomorrow?" he asks the screen.

He can hear her taking a deep breath and can sense her counting to ten in her head. "Eleven o'clock," she finally says, "and you'd better pray that I don't murder you."

By eleven o'clock the next morning he has come to a decision regarding her. He has sifted through the facts.

Item A: He likes her. She's bossy, messed up, with excess baggage - starting with her abusive relationship, ending with her kid, and with tons of other stuff in between - but she's sharp, funny, and indifferent to those flaws of his that drive others crazy.

Item B: He enjoys her company. (He'd assumed till now that he simply doesn't like other people; he hardly ever wants to spend one-to-one time with - with anyone really. Certainly not with the women he has sex with.)

Item C: She's going to keep turning up like a bad penny every few months unless he can figure out how to stop her. But then, why should he stop her? (See items A and B.)

Item D: What he saw as a disadvantage a few weeks ago, namely having a long-distance relationship with no sex, could in fact be an advantage. He's just experienced all too painfully the downside of short-distance non-relationships involving sex: people suddenly develop weird expectations; the things he does outside the relationship are weighed and measured; he is expected to invest time and emotional capacity. In a long-distance relationship there are no such constraints. The time he invests is clearly defined by her arrivals and departures. Outside that time frame, he isn't accountable to her in any way, not if he isn't her boyfriend. As for getting some, since she won't cater to his needs, she can't object to his having a sex life of his own, so he's as free as he ever was. If she continues coming over three or four days every six weeks or so and if he accordingly takes a few days off work, then he'll be seeing more of her than he ever did of Sharon. There's another upside to this non-relationship arrangement: he doesn't need to bother about the kid in any way. Or, seen from the opposite perspective, if she were interested in a relationship, she'd have to ask herself sooner or later where her girl fits in, and sooner rather than later it would strike her that a long-distance relationship and a child don't go together at all. And then he'd be history.

So, all things considered, he's better off catering to her whim of 'looking after him in a platonic fashion' than trying to press their whatever-it-is into a 'normal' mould. Hugs and cuddles seem to be allowed, pecks on the cheek too, while French kisses apparently aren't. Holding hands? He'll have to try that out.

She breezes in at eleven sharp. "You look terrible, and you have sunburn."

"Well, thanks. _I_ didn't spend two hours crashing on the sofa drooling over other people's shirts last night, so I'm sleep-deprived. And I'm not sunburnt. I have a healthy tan."

"Your bald spot is sunburnt. And there's no such thing as a 'healthy' tan." She sounds like Hermione Granger. He wonders whether he's Ron or Harry. Or, God forbid, Neville. He wonders, too, whether he'd rather be Ron than Harry. He feels his head gingerly. She's right, damn her.

"My flight leaves at five, so I have to be in Heathrow by three at the latest. What can we do till then? And don't even suggest sex!"

He grins and stops leering at her. Four hours, of which two will be needed for the drive to London. That cramps his style, to put it mildly. Unless one combines the drive and the activity. "Okay, we'll drive over to Bath, and then we'll have cream tea in the Cotswolds. Culture, nature, food." He makes shooing movements towards the door.

When he holds out his hand to her she hesitates, but then she takes it.


	8. Not at Home

**May 2012**

_"Dr Weller?" Nurse Wyatt poked her head through the door of his office. "We have a problem here."_

_Through the open door sounds wafted in from the corridor, a clanging and thumping that Dr Simon Weller, head of the Brain Injury Unit at London's Maudsley Hospital, had no problems identifying as the clash of cutlery on crockery accompanied by rhythmic foot stomping. It was a sound he'd manfully been ignoring every noon the past six or so weeks, ever since a certain patient had recovered sufficiently to partake of common meals in the dining room._

_"Don't we have a problem here every day?" he asked rhetorically, pushing his reading glasses up his nose._

_"We've got a different problem today," Wyatt said grimly, but with a hint of amusement in her voice. "This week, the patients wantto eat their dinner."_

_"Well, that's wonderful, isn't it?" Weller said with a hint of impatience, his eyes sliding back to his journal._

_Wyatt stood there silently, not budging._

_Giving up, Weller threw his hands into the air. "All right, if they want to eat their dinner, then why ... Oh, no, don't tell me the kitchen has burned the food again! Can't Rupert fix this?" he asked querulously. "It's his job, not mine."_

_"Wait a sec," Wyatt said, scooting off and leaving the door ajar behind her._

_The racket outside grew louder - she must have opened the door to the dining hall - and now Weller could hear the patients chorusing something that sounded like, "Meat A-larms! Meat A-larms!" He sincerely hoped that there wasn't a movement afoot to turn the unit into a vegan zone. It was a sad and unfortunate truth that it was cheaper to feed the hungry masses with meat than with fibrous, vitamin-rich vegetables. Just as he got up to close the door, Nurse Wyatt reappeared bearing a tray in her hands._

_She placed it on his desk. On it was a plate with a few scattered items of food on it and cutlery. "Try this, please," she said._

_Scratching the side of his nose with his forefinger, Weller eyed the plate uneasily. There was A Reason why he eschewed the food served at the hospital, preferring to bring a packed lunch to work._

_"So, what's on the menu today?" he asked with forced joviality._

_"It's got some fancy name I can't remember," Wyatt answered, "but don't worry, you'll like it."_

_She stood in front of his desk, twelve stone of unmoving matronly bulk versus his eight stone of cowed academic. It was a convincing argument. He sat down, picked up the fork and knife, gave Wyatt a morituri te salutant look and set to it. After two forkfuls he paused._

_"Hmmm," he murmured. "That's quite good, actually."_

_"Quite good?" Nurse Wyatt asked with emphasis._

_"It's terrific, to be honest," he admitted. "Perhaps the patients' protests about the quality of the food weren't such a bad idea after all, if they made our kitchen staff buckle up."_

_"This wasn't cooked by our kitchen staff, I'm afraid. Mr Barnes cooked this, assisted by a few of the other patients."_

_Dr Weller paused with his fork half-way to his mouth. "Peter Barnes?" he repeated, sure he'd misheard._

_"That's ri-ight," Wyatt sang, her eyebrows wagging merrily._

_Weller stared thoughtfully at his plate. "Hmmm." He was due to see Barnes this afternoon anyway. Why not see him now? "Nurse Wyatt, will you ask him to step in here for a moment, please? And see whether you can find Deepak, will you?"_

_As he waited, chewing on meditative mouthfuls of food, he searched his memory for information on Barnes, Peter: male, mid-fifties, admitted ten weeks earlier with symptoms of severe amnesia. He'd been dumped on the doorstep of the Maudsley like an orphan on the threshold of a church: he'd been accompanied by the skimpiest of medical records, and by the time the admitting doctors had realised that there was something very wrong with his paper work, the ambulance crew that had brought him in had disappeared. Whoever their patient was, he was definitely not the Peter Barnes who had disappeared off the coast of Norfolk while sailing some six years ago, no matter what his paperwork might claim. A short research into the medical history of the real Peter Barnes, as documented by his GP and his dentist, had provided resounding clarity on that (and incidentally squashed the budding hopes of his family, but that was neither here nor there.)_

_Those, however, were issues that bothered the bureaucrats over in administration; the members of the Brain Injury Unit would, of course, have been grateful for a complete medical history to help them assess what exactly they were dealing with, but even without a patient history, the person who held papers issued to Peter Barnes was providing enough fodder for a fair number of publications. Anterograde amnesia, the inability to form new memories, was a fairly common condition, a staple of Alzheimer patients. The pseudo Peter Barnes, however, was blessed with retrograde amnesia, and that of the kind only affecting his episodic memory, the remembrances of his personal life; all factual memories were intact, as were those practical skills and abilities that they'd tested for. Cases like that were exceedingly rare; the longer the unit had access to Barnes, the better for the scientific world in general and for the Brain Injury Unit's standing in said world in particular._

_Unfortunately, the NHS only paid for in-patient treatment for a maximum of ten weeks. After that patients had to be released into out-patient treatment or transferred to other facilities. Barnes's ten weeks were exhausted - the potential that his amazing condition offered for the department wasn't. If Barnes were to take over the kitchen, then his presence would be doubly beneficial to all._

_Deepak Sengupta, Barnes's neuropsychiatrist, came in a few moments later clutching a thick file. Weller, indicating his full mouth, waved him into one of the visitor chairs. Spying the plate on the desk, Deepak's face fell._

_"Ah - I'm very sorry about that," he said, his head waggling in apology._

_"Sorry?" Weller queried. "It's great!"_

_"I meant the kitchen staff's strike, sir."_

_"The kitchen staff are on strike?" Weller asked with a sense of foreboding. "Is that why Barnes has been cooking?"_

_"No, not quite," Deepak said, wriggling uncomfortably in his chair. "Mr Barnes made a bet with the chef that he could cook edible food for the whole unit without exceeding the weekly budget. The chef took him up on it, so Mr Barnes has been cooking the whole week, today being the last day. Today an independent jury consisting of the cleaning staff deemed him the winner of the bet."_

_"Oh. What did he win?"_

_"He won't say, but the rumour mill has it that it was a substantial sum of money."_

_"Well, heaven knows he can use it - he's pretty strapped for cash," Weller said tolerantly. "And it serves the chef right - but please don't quote me on that! But what's the connection to the strike?"_

_Deepak twirled a lock of his hair. "The patients are threatening to go on a hunger strike if the quality of the food doesn't improve, saying that if Mr Barnes can cook like that, there's no reason why our cooks can't. The kitchen staff, in turn, says that they can't work if every Tom, Dick and Harry gets to vote on the quality of their food."_

_Dr Weller pushed his errant spectacles back up his nose once more. "Odd. I'd always understood that free-market economy was all about consumer demand determining what is supplied."_

_Deepak grinned. "Unfortunately, sir, the food supply at this hospital is a monopoly."_

_"Don't we have a moral duty to break monopolies?" Weller mused._

_Just then the door opened without any previous warning. Deepak vacated the visitor's chair and came over to Weller's side of the desk as a tall, wiry man strolled in and pointedly ignored the hand Dr Weller extended towards him, choosing instead to ramble around the room._

_"Good afternoon, Mr Barnes," Weller said._

_Barnes grunted._

_"A cup of tea, perhaps? No? Well, I'll have one." Weller switched on the water boiler that perched awkwardly on the window sill and placed a bag of PG Tips in a mug commemorating the 2012 Olympic Games._

_Barnes stopped for a moment in front of a Miro print before moving on to the bookshelf at the far wall, idly flicking a finger at the butterfly mobile suspended from the ceiling as he passed under it. He set off the Newton's cradle on the shelf before coming over to Weller's desk, the clacking of the metal balls a rhythmic accompaniment to his slightly uneven gait._

_The water boiler bubbled and rumbled. Weller went over to it and poured water into his mug before returning to his desk. "Mr Barnes, it seems you like working in the kitchen ..."_

_Barnes snorted derisively. "What the fuck gave you that idea?"_

_Weller looked down at the plate in front of him. Its polished emptiness stared back at him accusingly. "You're an excellent cook. Your food is truly amazing. It seems reasonably safe to assume that you worked as a cook ...,"_

_"Ass - you - me," Barnes mouthed, while Deepak shifted uncomfortably in Weller's peripheral vision._

_"What is it, Deepak?" Dr Weller asked._

_"Mr Barnes excels at a lot of things," Deepak said apologetically. "We haven't talked about the results of his skills tests yet, sir, but they're in the file."_

_Barnes smirked. "Looks like your Bright Young Thing here is trying to get his publication on the patient Peter B. completed before the rest of the department has access to the results."_

_Suppressing his irritation as best he could, Dr Weller opened the file. A set of photographs depicting Barnes's contributions to the creative arts group, a compulsory part of therapy, caught his eye. He raised his eyebrows enquiringly at Deepak._

_"Last week's theme was three-dimensional objects, I believe. It entailed working with metal and soldering," Deepak explained, blushing slightly._

_"I hope you aren't exhibiting these in our vitrines," Weller said drily, "else we'll have the vice squad closing our unit down." He made a mental note to have a talk with Deepak about Barnes's sexual issues._

_Barnes leaned back in his chair, crossing his ankles and folding his hands behind his head. "So maybe I earned a living as ... a plumber." His voice dripped with sarcasm, which wasn't surprising when one considered the next entry, the results of IQ tests performed on him after his arrival. He'd scored well above 130 during his first week._

_"Or in the IT industry," Weller suggested. A lot of science geeks populated the world of electronics and computer science. He turned another page. Or as translator for the UN - the man was fluent in six languages. "Mr, ah, Barnes, you have an impressive list of skills and accomplishments. In fact, I'm at a loss to understand why no one has turned up here to claim you."_

_"Can we get back to what I want?" Barnes interrupted his musings. "I want to be released."_

_"I'm not sure that would be wise," Dr Weller said cautiously. "You have a rare condition whose cause and origin we have not yet discovered. As long as that's not the case it would be wise to keep you under observation._

_"Ten weeks ago you presented here with severe retrograde amnesia - the inability to recall events from the past - and an amputation that our surgeons date as having taken place between six months and a year ago. We assumed at the time that your amnesia resulted from the same traumatic event - possibly a motoring accident - that caused the leg injury, especially since there was evidence of massive head trauma dating back further than ten weeks. We also assumed that the evidence of a recent invasive procedure on your brain was part of a very amateurish attempt to treat your amnesia."_

_If any of this interested Barnes, he didn't show it. Instead, his fingers beat a complicated tattoo on the armrests of his visitor's chair._

_Weller hid his irritation as best he could. "All this could be correct. But we also assumed that you were suffering from anterograde amnesia as well as retrograde amnesia, because you had no memory of events between the trauma and the surgery. Within a few weeks, however, it was clear that this wasn't the case; you are perfectly capable of forming and assimilating new memories. Which is odd, very odd." He scratched his head before continuing, "In short, either the brain surgery cured your pre-existing anterograde amnesia, or - you never had that to start with. In that case your retrograde amnesia is not a result of the trauma that caused your amputation, but of the recent brain surgery, and there is no connection between the two events."_

_Barnes leaned forward and drew his file out from under Weller's nose, opening it to the section that harboured the brain scans made right after his admission. He pulled his reading glasses out of his shirt pocket and put them on. Then he riffled through the scans with a practiced air, finally drawing one out and holding it up against the window. "We know the cause of my amnesia. Here: two holes bored into my skull. Think two electrodes, one inserted till here," he pointed to a slightly darker spot on the scan, "and the other one till there. The shocks would target the hippocampus and nothing else, causing no damage to any other area of the brain. What are the functions of the hippocampus?" he asked, turning to Deepak._

_"Forming new memories, accessing old ones and navigation," Deepak shot out._

_Barnes nodded in approval. "Good boy," he said condescendingly, giving Weller a challenging stare._

_"The shocks would also cause anterograde amnesia," Deepak objected. "There's practically no way of targeting the hippocampus so exactly that you ...,"_

_"Silovsky and Chen, 2010," Barnes replied. He got up, walked over to the journals and pulled one out. "Here, you've got the article in your own office. They re-examined all known cases of retrograde amnesia caused by trauma or EST and came to the conclusion that if the damage was restricted to certain parts of the hippocampus, then the effect on other memory forming or retaining processes would be minimal."_

_Weller picked the abandoned scan and considered what Barnes had said. "Hmm, yes, but EST, even the invasive type with electrodes where you posit them, would damage some of the surrounding area. You can't restrict the electric field to the area you need to target - it spreads radially, to some extent." He suddenly remembered his tea. Throwing the scan down again, he extracted the tea bag from the mug, added two teaspoons of sugar and a generous dollop of milk from the small fridge jammed into the corner of the room behind his desk._

_Barnes had picked up a pencil from Weller's desk which he now twirled around in a most annoying fashion. "You could," he said slowly, his eyes narrowed in thought, "if you used flat electrodes that faced each other, like this - and this." He used the pencil to indicate the location and the extent of the electrodes. "Then you'd have a homogeneous field between the electrodes like that of a capacitance, and the damage would be limited to the area between the two electrodes."_

_Deepak was peering at the scans, fascinated. "Sir, that's totally possible," he practically squeaked with excitement._

_"Totally," Weller agreed drily, his tone mocking, "except that by inserting flat, wide electrodes one would be risking wide-scale surgical damage in order to limit the electric damage."_

_Barnes was examining the other scans. "You can't deny, though, that I do have holes in my skull, and not just the two I just pointed out. I'm assuming that they weren't made just for fun. Normally, EST for depressions isn't an invasive surgery."_

_Weller shrugged. "A brain biopsy is another possibility, with subsequent surgery for the tumour that may have caused your amnesia."_

_"Not enough scarring for that," Barnes shot him down, pushing one of the scans over to Weller._

_"And you're an expert on scarring in brain tissue after surgery," Weller remarked mildly._

_Barnes threw him a half-questioning, half-irritated glance. "Looks like it," was all he said._

_"Very well," Weller said. "If such a procedure did take place, then why? It doesn't make sense, any more than invasive EST does. Why would anyone do that? No sane neurologist would deliberately and viciously target the hippocampus risking such severe side effects as the procedure that you describe would entail."_

_Barnes pursed his lips, deep in thought, his fingers busy again on Weller's desk fingering the objects there, pushing them around, re-arranging them. "You're assuming my amnesia was a side effect. Suppose it was the aim of the whole procedure."_

_"You're saying someone deliberately induced your amnesia," Weller said doubtfully. "Why?"_

_"No idea," Barnes admitted._

_"You mean, like Jason Bourne?" Deepak interjected. "You knew too much, so your memory had to be erased." His excitement was palpable._

_"That's very romantic, to be sure," Weller, who had no idea who Jason Bourne was, said with a marked lack of enthusiasm, "but if someone wanted his memory erased it would have been a lot easier to erase the whole person rather than to perform a complicated and risky surgery whose outcome was exceedingly uncertain. Such things happen in films. In real life, you get threatened at the best; at the worst your corpse lands at the bottom of the Thames weighed down by a convenient millstone."_

_"So you think it's a coincidence that I have amnesia, and turn up on your doorstep with bogus papers and no clue as to my true identity."_

_"No, I think that the surgeons who damaged your brain would prefer not to be sued. You have memories of cognitive tests being performed on you in the days before you arrived here heavily sedated. My theory is that when your attending surgeons discovered that they had caused wide-spread brain damage with whatever madcap surgery they performed, they decided to take advantage of your amnesia to rid themselves of what could prove to be a major professional and financial embarrassment. Here," he said, tossing the admissions form over to Barnes, "look at the names of the ambulance crew that signed you in."_

_Barnes looked at the admissions form, and then frowned at Weller. "The idiots at your admissions desk didn't think it odd that the crew were named Watson and Lestrade?"_

_Weller had the grace to look apologetic. "The admissions desk is usually busy with the patient. They tend to ignore any larks the ambulance crew indulge in as long as patient care isn't affected. And do remember, when you were admitted we had no notion that you might not be Peter Barnes."_

_"Fine," Barnes said, "but this supports my theory as well as yours."_

_"True, but how many neurosurgeons do you think there are who would consider performing a procedure as dangerous as that, and why would you have consented to anything of the sort? And if you didn't consent, then why bother with such niggling considerations as whether you'd end up a human vegetable? Restricting the damage to that particular area of your hippocampus only makes sense if one is trying to avoid other impairments at all costs. Why do that if they didn't care about the state of your mental health?" He leaned forward. "If I were asked to erase your memory, I'd go the Full Monty and shock everything in its vicinity just to make sure you didn't remember a thing, even if you ended up not knowing about the French Revolution or what you'd had for breakfast. Your theory is based on the assumption that whoever didn't like that you knew whatever it was, cared enough about you to want to preserve the quality of your life. What kind of person fits that bill?"_

_"Someone who ...," Barnes began, but then trailed off, deep in thought again, fiddling around with more objects on the desk. "What happened to Holmes?" he suddenly asked._

_"Sorry?" Deepak said, startled at this_ non sequitur _._

_But Weller knew at once what Barnes was talking about, mainly because he'd asked that question himself when he'd examined Barnes's papers at leisure. "Here," he said, flicking the file open to the medical documents that had accompanied Barnes on his admission, "the scant medical history that came with you. Interestingly, it is yourmedical history, not that of the real Peter Barnes; the scans show your brain and leg, not his. And everything is signed by Dr S. Holmes."_

_Barnes bent over the file frowning, his tongue poking out from the corner of his mouth. He was a quick reader - his eyes moved almost diagonally across the page instead of to and fro. Then he picked up a pen from the desk and scribbled something on a post-it that he tore from Weller's pad. Whatever it was that he scribbled, it seemed to answer some question of his, because after staring at it for some seconds he scrunched it up and threw it at the waste paper basket, missing it by about half a foot._

_"Could I have been a doctor?" he asked no one in particular._

_"It's - very likely," Weller said cautiously, "given the extensive medical knowledge and skills that you display."_

_"'Very likely' won't get me my licence back."_

_"Mr Barnes, nothing will get your licence back, if you ever had one. You can't remember your medical training."_

_"My procedural memory is intact, as is my semantic memory!"_

_Weller sighed. "There's no verifiable proof for that, and you're medically well-informed enough to know it. Mr Barnes, you need to think about job placement, accommodation, and so on. I believe you have no financial resources worth mentioning. I could arrange for you to work in the kitchens of the hospital and continue to get treatment as an out-patient. We have limited staff accommodation, but I'm sure something can be arranged."_

_"No, thanks."_

_"Mr Barnes, you have no certificates proving a higher education, training or job experience. You have no assets and you have no friends. What were you thinking of doing when you get released? ... Ah, please don't break that!"_

_Barnes had turned his attention to a puzzle consisting of a string circle looped around the bases of seven intersecting hoops._

_"It's a model of a puzzle I saw at the Science Museum," Weller remarked casually. "The challenge is to get the string out through the hoops without having to unknot it. The fastest I've ever seen anyone solve the puzzle is just over seven minutes."_

_That got Barnes's attention. Tipping his head expectantly, he narrowed his eyes. "I can undercut that mark," he stated._

_"You can try," Weller said, allowing a hint of condescension to enter his voice._

_Barnes gave him a calculating look. "Are you a sportsman, Weller?"_

_Weller knew when he was being manipulated, but an appeal to his honour as a gentleman was hard to resist. "I'm as game as the next man," he said._

_"All right. If I take more than seven minutes to get the string off the loops, I work in the kitchens for four weeks, during which time I get paid a full salary plus accommodation." When Weller opened his mouth to protest, Barnes brushed him off with a sweep of his arm. "You can examine me one hour per day, making a total of thirty hours in that month: scans, tests, but no therapy sessions. If I take less than seven minutes, I win 250 pounds off each of you," here he looked at Deepak, "and you get me a job placement in forensic pathology."_

_"I have no idea whether ...," Weller prevaricated._

_"Fine, I'm out of here," Barnes said, rising._

_"It's a deal," Weller said quickly. The only forensic pathology that he had connections to was in Bristol. But then, the only person he'd ever seen solve the puzzle in less than half an hour had been a very bright physics student who was now the incumbent of a prestigious chair at Cambridge University._

_"Sir, I wouldn't ...," Deepak interjected, but Weller, ignoring him, pushed the puzzle towards Barnes._

_Deepak got out his mobile phone, switched it to stopwatch mode and placed it on the desk. Barnes sat down again, but instead of setting to work at the puzzle he picked up a paper clip from Weller's desk and twisted it between his fingers. For two minutes he twisted and teased the clip, his eyes trained on the puzzle. Then he turned in his chair to stare out of the window, one hand straightening the clip while the other tapped out a rhythm on his prosthetic._

_"Three minutes, sir," Deepak said._

_Weller's tensed gut slowly unclenched as he envisioned another month of in-depth physical examinations coupled with refined memory tests. Barnes ignored Deepak. But ten seconds later he turned to the puzzle, the abandoned clip dropping on the ground. His fingers, long and elegant, hovered for a moment, and then he took hold of the string and started threading it in and out of loops, pausing every now and then to contemplate his progress, his lips alternately tightening and expelling air in explosive pops. After what seemed a long time he gave the string a last tug, extracting it from the topmost loop, and placed it in a neat heap next to the puzzle._

_"Five minutes, fifty-three seconds," Deepak announced. Barnes whooped like a little boy, jumped off the chair and did a somewhat shaky Dance of Victory routine ending in a Saturday Night Fever pose. (That one, at least, Weller recognised.) Dropping the pose, he held out his hand to Weller and Deepak expectantly._

_"I should have mentioned, sir, that recently Mr Barnes's scores in IQ tests have exceeded the range within which we can test accurately," Deepak murmured. "His relatively low score on admission was probably a result of impaired brain function due to the recent procedure."_

_Weller would have to have a serious talk with Deepak about withholding findings in order to spruce up his own career at the expense of the rest of the department. A very serious talk. A two hundred and fifty pound talk._

_"Deepak, do you have five hundred pounds on you?" Weller asked rhetorically. "No? Then go to the next cash point and get the money, please."_

_Deepak slunk out, probably happy to have his set-down postponed._

_"I have contacts to forensic pathology in Bristol," Weller said to Barnes. "And I'll give you a referral to a psychiatrist who ...,"_

_"Don't need it," Barnes growled. He nodded at his medical file. "Just a copy of that."_

_"Very well, you'll get your full medical records when you're released."_

_"Which will be?"_

_Weller sighed. A quick run through his mental check list told him that he hadn't realised a single aim of this session: Barnes would leave the Maudsley, he'd be outside the Brain Injury Unit's catchment area, he probably wouldn't participate in a follow-up programme, and he had just cost him 250 pounds. This wasn't a lost battle; it was a complete rout._

_"On Monday," he said resignedly, ignoring Barnes's victorious smirk._

_Barnes sauntered out, a superior expression on his face._

_Getting up to get another cup of tea, Weller spotted the post-it that Barnes had scribbled on lying on the ground. He automatically bent to pick it up and smoothed it on his desk, curious to see what a savant like Barnes had noted down on reading his own medical record._

_'Sherlock Holmes', the post-it said. A whole file full of medically relevant information, and all he'd found noteworthy was that the physician who had signed his medical records had chosen to mask his identity behind that of a fictive nineteenth century detective?_

_Weller opened the file that had arrived with Barnes and stared at the top entry, a medication plan set up by said 'Sherlock Holmes'. And then he saw it too: the signature at the bottom of the medication plan - the loop at the base of the capital 'S', the slant of the 'H', the way the 's' was tagged onto the 'e' - was identical with the writing on the post-it. Weller leafed through the rest of the file; it was always the same signature._

_Either the man currently known as Peter Barnes was a top-notch forger or he was responsible for crippling one of the most outstanding brains of his generation - his own._

* * *

A few days later he runs into Ellie in a second-hand bookstore in Clifton. That isn't all that surprising, really, since his favourite haunts are chosen for their proximity to locations that he knows the way to, and this bookstore happens to be within viewing distance of their regular pub. Still, he'd rather not be discovered by her while browsing a travel guide on America's East Coast. He replaces it hurriedly and takes out another at random: 'Hiking in America's National Parks'.

Ellie raises an eyebrow. "Getting a new hobby to go with your new girlfriend?"

He twirls the book around. "She isn't my girlfriend."

"But you're thinking of going to America."

Is he? "It's an interesting place," he evades.

Ellie nods. He turns back to the bookshelf and replaces the book on hiking. He's just taking one out about California when Ellie asks, "Where'd you live when you were in America?"

He's so surprised that he drops the book.

She picks it up and hands it to him. "You _did_ live in America, didn't you?"

"I don't remember ever mentioning it," he says carefully.

She flushes and holds both hands out, palms up, placatingly. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to pry."

He steps closer, looming over her, narrowing his eyes. "What makes you think I've lived there?"

Her eyes widen in alarm. "Look, I'm really sorry. Forget it. Please."

Another customer stiffens, obviously aware of them but still pretending to be absorbed in the books. Pete takes hold of Ellie's elbow and guides her out of the shop. She doesn't resist him, but it's the acquiescence of fear. There's a small café close by into which he steers her, not really listening to her breathless apologies (or possibly prayers).

"Tea or coffee?" he asks.

"Sorry?"

"Treat's on me. Tea or coffee?"

"Coffee, please," she says faintly.

"Anything to eat?"

She shakes her head.

By the time he returns with two cups of coffee and a bacon butty, she has regained some colour. He takes a hearty bite before returning to his original question, talking with a full mouth. It's his experience that the more you act like a pig, the less threatening you are, especially when your opposite is a primary school teacher. "What makes you think that I have lived in America when I've never talked about it? That makes it somewhat unlikely, doesn't it?"

"You never talk about anything that's personal, do you, so that's hardly a logical argument. You never talk about your family, what happened to your leg, what you did before you came to Bristol, nothing. You're pretty reserved." She shreds a paper napkin. "You can do a perfect American accent; you know all there is to know about American culture, history, geography, trivia, you-name-it."

"I know all there is to know about a _lot_ of things."

"Very well, let me give you an example," Ellie says, leaning forward. "Remember that time we watched baseball together at Annabelle's place? You were the only one who could explain what was going on, and you knew the kind of trivia that people usually know about football or cricket."

"I also know football and cricket trivia," he counters weakly, but he knows what she means.

"No. You know everything about the past few years, but when the talk at the table goes back to what happened in the national league, say, ten years ago, you're mostly silent. If you had been living here, you, of all people, would know."

"That doesn't mean I was living in America. It could have been anywhere else in the world."

"True," Ellie says tiredly, tugging a hand through her short blonde hair, "and this conversation is ridiculous. I made a surmise based on some observations I made. If you say I'm wrong or that it's none of my business, that's perfectly alright. I won't mention it again."

He's tearing open packets of sugar and spilling them on the table to make a sugar hill. He moulds it into a cone and flattens the top. When the sugar refuses to stay up, trickling down into a flat heap, he wets it with a spoonful of coffee and moulds it once more.

"Will you stop doing that please, Pete? You'll get us thrown out of here."

"Where in America?" he asks her, "Where in America do you think I may have lived?"

Ellie shoots him a look of pure irritation. "How would I know? Is this some sort of test?"

He smashes his spoon onto his sugar sculpture, flattening it. Then he leans back and closes his eyes.

She peers at him. "Pete, are you alright?"

"I don't know," he says. "I - don't know."

It's there somewhere in his head, the information he's looking for, _but he can't get at it_. When he wants to get at everyday information - facts, bits of trivia or the like - he tosses whatever he has to go on around in his head, waiting for random associations to wash what he needs from a deeper layer to the surface of his brain. To assist the process he'll visualise whatever he's got, keep his hands occupied with different objects and textures, move around, toss his ideas at other people. The image in his mind for this process is that of assembling a complicated puzzle. There are pieces that don't seem to belong at all; others seem to be missing; and when one starts constructing the picture from one corner, the other areas are formless and void. But even as one begins the gargantuan labour with a blank surface, one knows that given time, the last insignificant bits will fall into place, revealing a completed picture that cannot even remotely be guessed at by studying the individual pieces.

There's no such certainty with his personal memories. He knows the pieces are there somewhere in the remoter nooks and crannies of his brain, but the logistics needed to access them have been destroyed. He's got his past stored in his brain, but he can't get at it. He needs a ruddy Mirror of Erised, not to find his parents, but to find his past.

And here's Ellie who, instead of helping him, is in a funk because he's coming across a tad creepy. She's the sharpest of their set; if she put her mind to it she might be able to help him decipher a few clues about his past. It _would_ help if he were looking in the right country for a change ...

Ellie musters him with a puzzled frown. "Are you trying to tell me that you don't know whether you've been to America?"

And suddenly it's easy. "Yes."

"You don't remember?"

"No."

"Pete, have you thought of seeing a doctor?"

He gives a hollow laugh, and then he tells her about his stay in Maudsley Hospital - the censored, abridged and bowdlerised version that can be crammed into roughly three sentences - but when she has absorbed the gist of his tale, she gapes. And then she applies herself to the problem.

"Why don't you post your picture on the internet? There's probably a Missing Persons website for the US; chances are that there a people out there looking for you who'd recognise you."

He's thought of that; in fact, he browses all the Missing Persons forums regularly hoping that someone who's looking for him has posted his picture there, but so far he's drawn a blank. "Thing is, I have a sneaky suspicion that I may not want to be found," he says, not looking up from the table where he is now drawing patterns into the sugar mess. "According to my medical files I'm an opiate addict; I have a number of interesting injuries - remind me to show you the scars someday," he says with a suggestive leer, but then he quickly sobers again. "One injury is a gunshot wound, another a burn from an electric shock, someone smashed my hand with a blunt, heavy object."

"So you're saying ...?"

"That I may have been in organised crime - a drug syndicate, smuggling, the Mob, who knows? - and if I advertise my whereabouts, I'll be extradited, tried and sentenced." Ellie doesn't look convinced. "Look, there are certain clues that I - that I was involved in the procedure that caused my amnesia. It looks as though the amnesia bit was carefully planned. I may be a much-sought criminal in a mob version of the witness protection plan."

Ellie doesn't brush the idea off immediately. She is, however, sceptical. "Why would you do that even if you were a hunted man? There's a greater likelihood of getting caught despite having built up a new existence if you didn't know that you had to hide, than if you knew and acted accordingly," she points out.

He puffs air from one cheek to the other; it's an objection that has occurred to him, too. "It's well possible that I assumed I'd figure out fairly soon that I may be in hiding - and I _did_ , before I was released from the Maudsley."

"But why would you choose to inflict amnesia on yourself?"

"Perhaps ... because I _wanted_ to forget?" he asks himself as much as her.

* * *

Ellie knows someone at the university who knows a linguist who in turn knows the incumbent of the chair for American Studies. They spend a 'delightful afternoon', as the linguist puts it, cross-examining him, and generally having a fun time at his expense with very little in the way of results to show for it, but both of them do agree in the end that he probably _is_ an American and that in all likelihood he spent a number of years on the East Coast. His accent (when he does his American one) is undefinable, the linguist says. He may have travelled a lot as a child.

"You should go there," Ellie says, as they leave the university together.

He has thought so himself, but he hasn't dared to admit it, not even to himself. "Where? America is big."

"You have to start somewhere. I'd say, go and visit that doctor of yours. It'll save you the money for accommodation, and it's on the East Coast."  
  
He'd thought too, that he should start off with Philadelphia, but it's always nice to have one's ideas confirmed by neutral observers.


	9. On the Doorstep

_**Part II: Philadelphia**_

**March 2015**

_A steady ringing pulled her out of her sleep. She squinted at her clock; it was 2 a.m. Heaving a deep sigh, she reached for the phone. Her job in 'Family and Community Medicine' had any number of downsides: it boasted neither the salary nor the clout that being dean of a well-placed teaching hospital brought with it, and she'd had to fight hard to gain some sort of standing at the hospital, but one of the upsides of being head of a department that dealt mostly with prevention, education, etc., was that emergency phone calls were a thing of the past. Till tonight._

_"Hello?" she said sleepily._

_"Dr Cuddy, it's Allison Cameron."_

_Cuddy frowned. She swatted vaguely at the lamp on her bedside table and propped herself up on one elbow. "Dr Cameron, what ..."_

_"It's Wilson." The steady throb of an engine accompanied her words. Cameron must be calling from a car._

_She leaned back against the backboard of her bed, closing her eyes again. "I haven't spoken with Wilson ever since I left Princeton three-and-a-half years ago."_

_"Dr Cuddy, I need your help."_

_Oh, no! This was why she'd left Princeton - to get away from this madness. "What has House done this time?"_

_"House?"_

_"Yes, House! If this is about Wilson, then House must have done something."_

_"House left three years ago," Cameron said flatly._

_"Oh. Where is he?"_

_"I have no idea," Cameron said somewhat impatiently. "Dr Cuddy, it's about Wilson, not about House. He needs to be put on psych watch."_

_Cuddy digested this. "Suicide attempt?"_

_"Yes."_

_She didn't need to ask what Cameron wanted. Wilson was head of oncology. Putting him on psych watch in his own hospital or anywhere where he'd be recognised at once would not improve his standing. House's department had only mastered his various crises so well because it was small and its members were fiercely loyal to their boss. Wilson, however, had a true behemoth of a department, and his authority depended as much on his aura as an unassailable rock as on his competence as an oncologist. A melt-down like this, if publicly known, would cause rumours, minor uprisings, and possibly the one or other coup attempt._

_"Where are you?"_

_"We've just left Princeton. We should be in Philadelphia in about half an hour."_

_Cameron must have been pretty sure of her assent. "Are you arriving in an ambulance? Does he need to be admitted to the ICU?"_

_"No and no. He OD'd on sedatives, but I found him before any major harm was done. He's stable."_

_"Okay, I'll alarm our admissions office and the psychiatric ward, and I'll meet you there." She put down the phone, swung her legs out of the bed and went to the bathroom. By the time she was dressed, ten minutes had passed. It took a further ten minutes to wake her neighbour, explain the situation to her and get her to move herself from her warm bed into Cuddy's spare bedroom, and another twenty to reach the hospital unit that harboured the psychiatric ward. Cameron was in the waiting area._

_"He's in already, talking to the psychiatrist on duty," Cameron said in hushed tones._

_"What happened?" Cuddy asked more brusquely than she intended. Something about Cameron had always rubbed her the wrong way, and being called out of bed in the middle of the night to help someone who in her mind was associated inseparably with House was not likely to improve her attitude towards the person who had called in this favour. Her personal attitude stood in stark contrast to her professional respect for Cameron - one of her last administrative acts before leaving PPTH had been to appoint Cameron head of Diagnostic Medicine, to Foreman's chagrin and Chase's dismay. Foreman, thwarted in his ambitions, had left PPTH to go west; Cameron's only stipulation on taking the job had been that Chase leave the department, a condition Cuddy had been willing to fulfil, transferring Chase back to surgery without batting an eyelid._

_"I needed Wilson to sign off a procedure. When he didn't answer his phone, I drove over to his place. His neighbour has a key and she let me in. I found him in his bedroom. I made him vomit, and most of what he took came out again, so I decided to risk bringing him here. He was adamant about not being admitted anywhere in the Princeton area."_

_"Since when does Wilson sign off other departments' procedures?"_

_"Rosario is gone on a conference," Cameron explained. Rosario was Cuddy's successor as dean of PPTH. "Richardson is responsible for medical issues when Rosario isn't there, but Richardson was - still is - in the OT, and Wilson is next in line, so I tried to contact him."_

_It sounded like solid reasoning, but it wasn't, as Cuddy well knew. If a procedure was so urgent that it couldn't wait for Richardson to come out of the OT, and the next in command didn't answer his phone, then one didn't go chasing him through the bars of Princeton. One either checked who was next on the list or one did the procedure at one's own risk. Given that Cameron was head of a department, the latter would definitely have been defensible. She felt tempted to ask Cameron whether she had gotten Wilson's signature before rushing him off to Philadelphia - it's what House would have done - but she was sure that the oh-so-urgent procedure had been forgotten over Wilson's needs._

_The psychiatrist on duty came up to them. "Dr Cuddy," he nodded in greeting. Cuddy rose, as did Cameron. "Dr Wilson has agreed to be admitted, which simplifies our formalities. I've sent him right on up to the ward." When Cameron opened her mouth in protest, he added pacifyingly, "Dr Wilson is exhausted and doesn't feel up to any more interactions. I'm sorry, but I'm sure you'll be able to visit him soon."_

_Cameron's mouth drooped. Then she took a deep breath and asked, "Did he mention any of his ... other problems?"_

_The psychiatrist gave her a reassuring smile, the kind reserved for over-protective family and friends. It was intended to convey that their loved one was in caring, capable hands. "My conversation with Dr Wilson was short in view of the lateness of the hour and his exhausted state. But we'll talk more extensively tomorrow, when Dr Wilson is rested, and I'm sure ..."_

_"There's a risk of DT," Cameron said hurriedly._

_There was a short silence. Then, after a glance at Cuddy, the psychiatrist said, "Very well. Thank you, Dr Cameron, we'll keep our eyes open." A quick tip of his upper body, like a short bow, and he was gone._

_Cuddy was less discreet. She turned to Cameron, her hands on her hips. "Wilson is an alcoholic?"_

_"Depends on whom you ask. He says he has his drinking under control," Cameron replied, her thinning lips indicating what she thought._

_Cuddy looked at her watch and made a quick decision. "There's a mean coffee machine in the doctors' lounge."_

_Cameron tipped her head in assent._

_A few minutes later they were seated on the shabby, but comfortable couch in the doctors' lounge, each nursing a cup. Cameron postponed talking by sipping her coffee. Cuddy waited patiently, knowing that Cameron would have refused her invitation had she wanted to evade this conversation._

_Cameron exhaled in a long breath and said, "It started after House left. Wilson continued as before, but ... he wasn't really there. He isolated himself, came in to work hung over, forgot appointments and meetings, ..." She shrugged. "The usual reaction to bereavement, I guess. I've been keeping an eye on him." At Cuddy's look of mixed amusement and disapproval she added, "I have the office next door - it's not a big deal, really."_

_Cuddy remembered with a feeling of melancholy when the 'eye-keeping' had worked in the opposite direction, from Wilson's office to diagnostics._

_"It's been a steady decline really," Cameron continued. "I have no idea what alerted me this evening, but I had a bad feeling when he didn't answer his cell or his pager. And I don't think seventy-two hours of psych watch will solve the problem."_

_"What do you want me to do?" Cuddy asked directly._

_Cameron looked straight at her, the serious, adjuring look that made lesser mortals buckle and do her bidding. "I want you to persuade him to get admitted to Mayfield. It did House a world of good."_

_"Excuse me?" Cuddy thought she wasn't hearing aright. "I understood that you believed that House was a corrupting influence, even after Mayfield."_

_"Well, yes. Anything other than that and Mayfield would have had to answer charges of brainwashing. But they got House to cooperate and stay in for three months of treatment, and that's what Wilson needs. A time out to recover and get his priorities sorted."_

_"And those are?"_

_Cameron looked down at her coffee. "He has to accept that House is gone for good, but that there are ... other things in life worth living for: his job, his friends, ..."_

_"He has friends other than House?" Cuddy couldn't help asking._

_Cameron stared at her. "Yes, of course!" At Cuddy's piercing gaze, she flushed slightly, but then she braced herself. "He could have friends, if he'd get over House and accept that although others can't fill that particular gap, he can live quite well with it if the rest of his life is full enough."_

_Cuddy chose not to comment that. Instead she asked the question that had occupied her mind ever since Cameron phoned her. "What happened to House?"_

_"No one knows, and Wilson is absolutely tight-lipped about it. After you left, we'd see him around occasionally. He was persona non grata at the hospital, but we'd catch glimpses of him with Wilson or in the park." Cuddy didn't bother to ask what Cameron would have been doing in the park. "Then, about three months after you left - and this was really odd - Wilson had him admitted for detox. There was a huge ruckus; Rosario blew his top, and he and Wilson had it out in the lobby of all places, with Wilson yelling that Rosario could hardly refuse a patient in need and a former employee, and that you'd have given House the chance to detox even though it was your place he wrecked, and so on."_

_Cuddy frowned. "Why did he detox at PPTH? Why not at Mayfield? The last detox at PPTH really didn't go well."_

_Cameron shrugged. "I have no idea, but I do know that this time Wilson supervised the detox. He checked who'd be on duty and he vetted some of the staff. It didn't go down well with psych."_

_Cuddy chuckled drily. "Rosario probably didn't know what hit him. He must have had Wilson down as harmless and good-natured till then, only to discover that he was the real boss at PPTH." She scratched her head contemplatively. "I should have warned Rosario, but I was too pissed at the way things had gone in the end to feel charitable towards my successor. So what happened after the detox? Do you think House relapsed and OD'd?" she speculated._

_"No. I think Wilson and House were planning his departure. Foreman also turned up a few times during that period, and he hobnobbed a lot with Wilson. Considering they weren't exactly best buddies before that, it was pretty obvious. After the detox both Wilson and House disappeared. Wilson returned about two weeks later and wouldn't say where he'd been or where House was. I'm assuming that he and Foreman built up a new existence for House somewhere under a new identity, but insisted that he be sober before they left him there."_

_Cuddy puzzled over this. "What good would a new identity have done him? It wouldn't have gotten him his licence back."_

_Cameron leaned back and sighed. "I'm sure there are hospitals that would baulk at employing the world-famous Dr Gregory House when it's a well-known fact that he lost his licence, but that won't look too closely at credentials presented by an unknown physician who bears an uncanny resemblance to a well-known diagnostician." At Cuddy's disbelieving look she added, "Oh, not here, where the chances of someone recognising him are too great, but what about some sunny Latin American republic with an acute shortage of well-qualified medical personnel and a lax attitude towards political correctness? They wouldn't be the first ones to jump at the chance of getting Gregory House cheap," she quipped with a side glance at Cuddy. "Does that sound so unlikely?"_

_"No, not for House," Cuddy agreed, "but Wilson as an accomplice in something that goes totally against the grain of what he believes in?"_

_"When Wilson started drinking I cornered Robert," Cameron said. "He refused to tell me what had happened, but he was in the know. I demanded to know what they'd done and he reassured me that he wasn't part of it. He said that no matter what I believed, there were some deeds that he wouldn't lend his hand to."_

_She and Cuddy exchanged significant glances. If Robert Chase, opportunist par excellence, had refused to participate in a plot devised by his former boss, then that plot had to have had some major moral hitch in it._

_"Whatever House persuaded Wilson to do, it's breaking him. He needs help; he needs to get away from Princeton and stay away. Sometimes," she shifted uncomfortably in her seat, "sometimes I think even the air there is poisoned."_

_"But you returned," Cuddy pointed out._

_"Yes," Cameron said slowly. "I thought that with House gone, ..." She trailed off, rotating her cup nervously in her hands._

_Cuddy rose. "It's a pain, isn't it, when you can't blame House for your misery anymore," she said without a trace of sympathy._

* * *

Cuddy is there punctually at ten a.m. to pick him up. The nurse on duty hands him a small plastic container with pills in it.

"Here's your medication for this afternoon, Dr Wilson. Dr Cuddy, you'll be bringing him back this evening before eight?"

"Yes, of course," Cuddy murmurs, giving him an apologetic smile.

It's awkward, being released into the care of a babysitter who once used to rely on _him_ for guidance and advice.

"Great! Well, have a lovely day, Dr Wilson. And don't hesitate to come back early or give us a call if there's any problem." This last is aimed at both of them.

"There won't be," he says grimly.

He picks up his bag and follows Cuddy out of Mayfield's heavy doors into the parking lot. This is the second time he's leaving Mayfield since he was admitted. The first time out on a day pass was a fiasco, leading to an extension of his stay and very strict conditions for future excursions. There's no doubt that Cuddy will see to it that those conditions are met.

"So," he says as Cuddy guides the car out of the parking lot, "what's the plan for today?"

"Nothing much. Just a regular Sunday," Cuddy says with studied casualness. "Rachel's at the soccer field. We'll pick her up, and then we'll have lunch. I thought we'd play it by ear after that."

He nods, trying to hide the slight unease that the prospect of an unmapped afternoon causes him. Once the initial humiliation of being admitted to a psychiatric institution had faded - a matter of hours - and the routine there had become familiar - a matter of a few days - he had derived immense comfort from not having to plan his own day, make his own decisions, deal with his own failures. Every minute is charted; if his schedule says 'leisure time', then it means leisure time. It means he's free to enjoy every moment of it in any way he likes without feeling guilty about the things left undone, because others decide for him what he has to do and when he has to do it.

There's a rule at Mayfield that released patients may not come to their ward as visitors, too great is the danger that they'll relapse just to return to the comfort of clearly structured life with no responsibilities. He himself was hesitant about giving the day pass, also known as 'stress test', a second try after the initial disaster, so hesitant that Darryl suggested that he might have sabotaged his first trip outside on purpose so as to extend his stay. He denied it hotly at first, but now, trying to get his agitation under control, he has to concede the point to Darryl. If Cuddy weren't driving the car, he'd be heading for the next bar, not so much because he needs the drink, but because having the drink will ensure that he won't have to deal with the decision 'To Drink or Not to Drink' for a long time.

He looks out at the landscape to distract himself. It's about a twenty minute drive to the soccer field, Cuddy says.

"The one at the park?" Wilson suddenly says. "What's she doing there?"

Cuddy's smile is half a grimace. "Her best friend has an Important Soccer Match and Rachel wants to cheer her on."

"That's ... great."

"I suppose so. I'd rather she lived her own life than live it vicariously through others, but that's a concept one can't really explain to a seven year old."

"Friendships are also important," he suggests.

Cuddy snorts. "Do you think her friend will come to watch Rachel if she ever decides to take up a sport?"

"Why not? Besides, friendship isn't always a tit-for-tat, eye-for-an-eye sort of arrangement."

Cuddy gives him a _you-should-know_ sort of look before turning her gaze back on the road. He sighs and stares out of the window.

At the soccer field he waits at the car while Cuddy goes to find Rachel. Small talk with the soccer moms is not on his agenda for today; besides, he wants to spare Cuddy the embarrassment of explaining who he is. _('No, he's not my boyfriend!' with an amused laugh. 'He's just a friend who - needs help.')_ She comes back with an excitedly jabbering Rachel who has to recount the entire game in detail.

"Mom, the referee was _totally_ against our team. It was _so_ unfair. He had no idea what he was doing! He should have called at least _three_ fouls on the other team, but he just ignored them!"

"Rachel, the referees do their best. I'm sure ..."

"No! The other parents said so too! Ciara's dad was yelling at him."

Wilson smiles, amused at the dilemma Cuddy finds herself in. She can now either criticise the other parents' behaviour (not really an option) or abandon the poor referee (not really an option either). He steps forward to rescue her.

"Hey, Rachel!"

"Oh, hi, Wilson! You should have come earlier. You missed a really good match."

"Did your friend - Emma, isn't it? - shoot a goal?"

"No. She plays defence," Rachel explains. "But she's really, really good. She's the best in the team. That's why she plays defence. You need a strong defence, because," she stops to recall the pearl of wisdom she must have gleaned from a grown up, "it doesn't matter how many goals you shoot if you let the other team shoot even more."

Wisdom from the mouth of babes. "Quite right," he says.

It's only a ten-minute drive from here to Cuddy's place, thank goodness, because if there's an off-switch to Rachel, Cuddy hasn't found it yet. As they get out of the car Cuddy whispers to him, "Don't worry - she'll come down again. She's always excited like this after social occasions, but she's fine once she's had a little quiet time with her books."

He looks up at the house, an apartment block in a quiet residential street in Germantown that reminds him of the one he lives in.

"Our apartment is on the top floor," Cuddy says.

"So you finally got your loft conversion." It's about the same size as his, but with an additional bedroom ('so mom can stay the night when she babysits for me') and without the open layout ('when you have a kid, you want a few doors that you can put between yourself and her!'). Furniture-wise, it's uncluttered. Cuddy must either have abandoned a lot of her things or they didn't make it through the double calamity that hit her house. He supposes that she must feel safer in an apartment than in a house, after what happened.

Lunch is a quiet affair. Rachel, who disappeared into her room while Cuddy got the food ready, reappears for the meal a lot calmer than before.

"So how's school?" he asks her, valiantly trying to make conversation.

"Boring."

O-kay. "But you meet your friends there."

"Only Emma. The others aren't my friends. They're stupid."

He glances at Cuddy to see how she'll deal with this, but Cuddy isn't bothered. She catches his glance and interprets it correctly. "She can _think_ what she likes about other people as long as she doesn't say it to their faces." At his doubtful look she adds, "Tell me, did you ever change your opinion on someone you disliked because your parents told you they were nice? _Especially_ when your parents didn't even know them?"

He thinks, but doesn't say, that House must have rubbed off more on her than she knows.

After lunch, Cuddy suggests that he and Rachel watch television together while she tidies up the kitchen, but he insists on helping her. He needs to keep busy, and doing the dishes is as good a task as any other. Not that he's jittery; he's getting calmer and more assured as the day progresses. If anyone's nervous, it's Cuddy. She jumps when he accidentally drops a spoon, peers out of the window at every odd sound from the street below, and freezes when the doorbell rings.

"Want me to get it, Mom?" Rachel calls from the living room.

"No, it's okay, I've got it," Cuddy shouts, defrosting and rushing to the door. She's back a moment later. "Only the neighbour," she says reassuringly. The thing is, _he_ isn't the one who needs reassurance.

Interestingly, it's Cuddy who brings up House first.

"You disapprove of the way I let Rachel talk, don't you?" she says, as they sit at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee once the dishes are done.

"It - doesn't seem like you."

"I'm not soft on her because her life is tough in other respects." She stares into the distance before she focuses on him again. "I want her to respect me the way I respected House for his absolute integrity. Telling her lies about her classmates or asking her to pretend to feel something for them when she doesn't isn't going to make her look up to me."

"They can't _all_ be stupid," Wilson feels forced to interpose.

"They aren't - when we moved here I made sure to place her in a school where she'd be challenged." There's a glint of the old Cuddy in her eyes, the one who is convinced that only the best is good enough for her daughter. "She doesn't mean they're stupid, she means that she doesn't _like_ them, and informing her that they're as intelligent as she is or that they have other wonderful qualities isn't going to make her like them more. Yes, I _could_ point out that there's a difference between not liking someone and considering them stupid, but again, that's a concept a seven year old doesn't really grasp. So I just try to limit the damage she does when she interacts with her classmates. _You_ should sympathise," she adds, "since _your_ patience with stupidity is limited, too."

"Excuse me?"

"Oh, come on! You were House's best friend for over twenty years, a colossal jerk and ass whose only mitigating qualities were his sticking to his somewhat skewered principles - which _you_ certainly never admired - and his genius. You were attracted to him because you found anyone else who might have made a good friend too boring in comparison."

"Umm, _I've_ been told that I had a parasitic need for his neediness."

"Oh, crap! Okay, yes, there may have been that too, but if you're looking for crippled addicts, my clinic is full of them. You could easily have found someone just as needy who was far less able to fend for himself, but you chose the most brilliant, witty, meddlesome ass around because of the entertainment value. The only two women who stood a chance with you against House, Amber and Sam, weren't exactly dumb either."

He considers the subtext. She has mentioned House, not once, but twice, and she's as edgy as an addict on the brink of cold turkey. Or as a PTSD sufferer on the verge of an anxiety attack. "You're in contact with House," he says, his emotions doing a wild swing between frustration at her foolishness, satisfaction at being able to read her so well, and bitterness at being left out of this.

She flushes as she looks down into her coffee mug. "Yes," she admits. "After I met him in Bristol I friended him on Facebook, and ..."

"Cuddy, are you _crazy_?" He can feel his anxiety level rising. "Forget it," he says carefully, slowly. "I don't think I want to know." That's a lie, but if he doesn't want to fall apart and return to Mayfield early in disgrace, he's going to have to await another day to explore this.

He gets up to find Rachel. "Hey, would you like me to show you how to do felting? We made flowers in my creative arts group, and I brought some wool along to show you."

He and Rachel spend the next hour in the kitchen immersed in a bowl of soap suds, while Cuddy looks on incredulously.

"They make the guys make felt flowers," she asks, "and there's no uprising?"

"We were also allowed to make hearts," Wilson deadpans. Then he explains, "Flowers are dead easy - even a guy with underdeveloped fine motor skills can do those - and felting, if it's done with soap water, doesn't require any sharp tools. That makes it ideal for therapeutic purposes."

"What's wrong with sharp tools?" Rachel asks.

"People could hurt themselves. You aren't allowed to use sharp knives or needles all by yourself, are you?" he evades.

"Aren't you all grown-ups at your hospital?"

Cuddy comes to his rescue. "Some of the people at Wilson's hospital might try to hurt themselves," she explains.

"Why?"

"I've told you about the stuff in our brains that makes us feel happy, endorphins," Cuddy says. "Some people don't have enough of that, and then they feel sad all the time. Pain makes your brain produce endorphins, so some people hurt themselves, hoping that that'll make them feel happier for a short time. But it's dangerous."

Rachel nods sagely. "If they hurt themselves too hard, they could kill themselves, and then they'd be dead."

"Yes," Wilson agrees, "that tends to be the consequence of killing yourself." He decides that if explaining self-harming and suicidal tendencies to a primary school kid is an example of adherence to House-ian principles of openness, then he is right to view them with distrust.

Rachel continues along her own train of thought. "Cedric Diggory is dead," she announces triumphantly, beaming at her mother. "Is that the sad bit in the story that you were warning me about? It wasn't really sad."

Cuddy lets out a sigh. "Harry Potter," she explains to Wilson. "Cedric's a student in the fourth book who gets killed by Lord Voldemort."

Now he remembers. He watched the movie with House in the theatre. "You're letting her watch the fourth Harry Potter movie? It must be PG-13 or something!" Despite years of dealing with House's convoluted logic, he can't even begin to fathom how this fits the category 'Teaching my child to respect my honesty and integrity'.

"No! Of course not!" Cuddy rubs her forehead. "Rachel refuses to read anything the school sets her as a task."

"They just give me boring stuff to read!" Rachel interjects.

"She's obsessed with Harry Potter. I figured it didn't matter _what_ she read, as long as she learned to read somehow."

"I suppose not," Wilson says somewhat uncertainly, although he's reasonably sure there is a good reason why school reading assignments for the second grade don't include texts from Harry Potter.

"So, I dumped the books in her room and told her she'd either read her homework assignment or a chapter of those every day, thinking that after one look at the first chapter of the first book she'd cave and return to her simple homework assignments. ... and I freely admit that I underestimated Rachel's drive when baited with Harry Potter. "

"Seems she's finished the fourth book," he says drily.

"Almost," Rachel confirms. "So can I read the fifth book now?"

Cuddy face palms. "This is crazy! Those books aren't meant for children her age."

Wilson refrains from pointing out that she gave Rachel the books in the first place. "Shall we play a game together?" he suggests, taking pity on Cuddy.

"Oh, yes!" Rachel speeds away to her room to find one.

Cuddy leans her forehead on one hand. "I guess empathy isn't her strong point," she says.

No, despite being adopted, she seems to have inherited a goodly portion of her mother's ruthlessness and singular dedication to reaching her aims.

At seven Cuddy packs Rachel off to the neighbour's apartment ("I don't want to go to Louisa! It's boring there!"). Then she takes him down to the car. He notices that before she gets in, she scans the street in both directions. Her paranoia is beginning to rub off on him, for he starts observing the cars behind them in his side mirror and soon singles one out that _could_ be following them. (Never mind that almost every car is going the same way they are, because they're heading straight for the Interstate.)

"What's up?" Cuddy suddenly asks him.

He's too caught up in this now to lie convincingly. "Oh, your jitters are contagious," he tries to laugh it off. "I'm starting to believe that someone may be following us."

Cuddy doesn't laugh with him. "Which car?" she asks, scanning the cars behind them in the rear-view mirror. He's silent - there's no sense in feeding her anxiety. "The blue one?"

How the hell does she know? Has she been observing the cars, too? "I'm sure I'm just imagining it. It's been a long day for me."

She glances at him, then back at the road. "Yeah," she says neutrally, "that's quite likely."

But her fingers tap the steering wheel impatiently at the next red light, and when it turns green she accelerates faster than is good for her tires. She takes the next turn-offs rather abruptly, without signalling her intentions, and on the I-76 she performs some interesting weaving manoeuvres that look like they are a lot of fun when they are shown on TV, but really aren't when experienced live. Her exit from the interstate is accomplished by slamming on the brakes and changing lanes just a few yards before the exit. The driver behind them honks and sticks up his middle finger. She's silent and tight-lipped until the guard at Mayfield waves their car through and lowers the barrier behind them. After a last glance in the rear-view mirror she stops the car in the parking lot and kills the motor. There's a long silence.

"Will you be okay on the way back?" he finally asks.

"I'll be fine," she says curtly. She doesn't pretend not to know what he's talking about. "I got us here in one piece, didn't I?"

Now that they're not driving anymore, he can risk talking about what is happening. "Cuddy, you're falling apart. You've been seeing and hearing phantoms all day, staring out of the window every time a car drove along the street, jumping when the doorbell rang, thinking that that car was following us. You've got House on your mind because you're in contact with him again - which is insane, totally insane, and you can see what it's doing to you. But he's not here. He's _not_ waiting outside your house. He's _not_ following your car. He's _not_ observing you. He's in Bristol, thousands of miles away."

Cuddy leans her head on the steering wheel for a long moment. Then she lifts her head and turns to face Wilson.

"No, he isn't," she whispers. "Oh, God, Wilson, I've been so stupid! House is here."


	10. A Warm Welcome

They've been driving for half an hour, Lisa and the unknown man in front, and his car in hot pursuit behind, and are on the western outskirts of Philadelphia when Lisa takes the exit off the interstate rather suddenly, drives down a large tree-lined avenue, and comes to a halt at the gatehouse of a large fenced-in compound. He brakes and draws up at the side of the road, watching as Lisa and her companion are waved through by the security guard and the barrier is lowered behind them. Then he gets out of the car and walks over to the gatehouse, aware of the guard's suspicious scrutiny and the blind stare of the security camera mounted on top of the gatehouse, but undisturbed by either. The road continues for about another quarter of a mile beyond the gatehouse, cutting straight through an expansive and well-tended park. Chestnut and beech trees are dotted along grassy expanses through which paths meander aimlessly; it is idyllic and peaceful, and if this were England, there would be a Georgian manor house of yellow sandstone situated on the slight rise at the end of the lane. Here a rectangular edifice looms over the grounds, its stark structure silhouetted against the setting sun, grey, impenetrable, threatening. The large signboard at the gate reads: _Mayfield Psychiatric Institution_ .

_Form follows function_ , he thinks. A sense of disquiet and unease overcomes him as he gazes at the imposing edifice, and abandoning any plans he may have had of following Lisa and her unknown companion into the grounds, he turns back to his car.

The guard pops his head out of the gatehouse. "Can I help you, sir?"

"No. No, I don't think so."

When he reaches the car, he automatically makes for the left-hand door. He stops to consider this: when he'd borrowed Gavin's car in Bristol, he had also moved towards the left-hand door first, which in _that_ case had been the wrong one. At the time, he had put his mistake down to the fact that on the rare occasions these past years that he'd gone by car he had always been a passenger. But now that he's in America, he can't help noting that having the steering wheel on the left side seems more natural to him, and driving on the right side of the road requires less concentration than trying to steer Gavin's car along the left side of Bristol's roads.

There's also the ease with which he purchased the wreck he is now driving; one look in the classified section of the local papers and he had known what part of town to go to and which code words to say in order to obtain a car as cheaply as possible with no paperwork attached, the last being a precondition to the purchase because he still possesses no valid licence. (There had been rather a nasty scene at the DVLA agency in Bristol, where he'd been told that - there being no record that he'd ever possessed a licence - he'd need to pass the practical and the theory test, present a medical certificate, etc., etc., the official wondering aloud whether an amputee with amnesia could be considered physically and mentally fit enough to participate in motorised traffic, upon which _he_ had pondered at an equal volume whether being cretinous was a standard requirement for employment at the DVLA or merely an additional qualification.)

He can't help feeling some sort of skewered male pride at the ease with which he communicates with the local criminal element, yet it's undeniable that with every further indication that his past was indeed American, proof is piling up that it was also on the left side of the law. The sensible thing to do would be to return to Bristol and take up his life as a model British citizen again, but that isn't an option. It hasn't been ever since he disembarked at La Guardia to find that everything felt familiar, from the accents assailing his ears to the candy bars and the quarters he needed to extract them from the vending machines.

Normally, he'd contact the police authorities or some agency specialising in missing persons, have his data, fingerprints and a DNA sample taken, and see whether they come up with a match. Thing is, he really doesn't want to spend the next years in a Texas death row cell. That is undoubtedly the worst case possible. But even less pessimistic scenarios see him in a prison cell, because there's a good chance that there's still an open warrant waiting for him somewhere. The alternative to the official route is to employ a private detective, but his finances aren't up to that. In fact, his finances aren't up to much of anything, so he'll have to get a job soon, the kind where employers overlook the absence of work permits, green cards and the like. The only reason he's sitting here on the outskirts of Philadelphia in a car trailing Lisa is because he's at a loose end for the time being, with no job and thus no money to pursue his primary aim. So until his finances kick off, he's solving the mystery that is Dr Lisa Cuddy.

He wasn't surprised at all when her enthusiasm at seeing him in Philadelphia was limited. He had figured that she compartmentalised her life, and that he was tucked away in a bottom drawer that had a lock on it and a label that read, 'Secret Life: Not for the eyes of friends and colleagues!' so he was prescient enough to not announce his arrival in advance, but to wait until the coach spat him out near the Pennsylvania Convention Center before he phoned her.

"You are - where?"

"Philadelphia," he repeated patiently, "at the ... well, I've reached the Reading Terminal Market now."

"Don't come here!" she instructed. He assumed 'here' to mean her hospital. "I'll meet you there. There's a sort of coffee shop on the north side. I'll be there in about an hour." During her lunch break, he supposed.

She was there ninety minutes later, stressed (which was to be expected), tense (also to be expected, since he'd picked the lock to the mental drawer she'd been keeping him in and jumped out), angry (fair enough, since his presence could be interpreted as an attempt to root around in the drawers labelled 'Personal life' and 'Professional life'), and - scared. (And try as he would, he had - and still has - no satisfactory explanation for her fear.) She did her best to disguise her fear with annoyance and anger, but her widened eyes and shallow breathing gave her away.

She slid into the seat opposite his. "What are you doing here?" Not in a tone of polite inquiry, let alone one of surprised pleasure.

"Nice to see you, too."

Yes, he'd got the message that her attitude towards men and relationships was ambivalent, and that she distrusted his type - the sharp, funny, unpredictable ones. But if she was fine spending half the night cuddled up against him on his couch, why should sitting across from him at a table in a crowded coffee shop spook her to the extent that her shaking hands would hardly allow her to hold her cup without spilling its contents? So since it couldn't be his mere presence that was freaking her out, then it had to be his presence in her Philly life specifically; and there was only one reason why he should appear more threatening here than on his home ground in Bristol: there was something here that she feared might turn him from an unprepossessing model citizen (well, almost) into a raging green Hulk, and that something could only be Another Guy. Conversely, it was possible that the knowledge of _his_ existence would transform the Other Guy into a raging green Hulk. Or, worst case, both of them would morph into raging green Hulks.

"Pete, you can't just turn up here and ..."

"I can. I did." He got up. "Forget it. This was a bad idea."

"Where are you staying?" she asked, a dollop of guilt topping off her spooked weirdness.

_Not with you, it seems_ , he felt inclined to say, but he'd never expected to stay with her, not when she had arrhenphobia and a kid. So he said, "Not sure yet."

She leaned her forehead on both her hands. "You shouldn't have come."

Which was so bloody flattering that he said, "Don't worry, I won't bother you any longer." He considered reassuring her that if it was him she was worried about, she could relax. He felt no desire to punch the other man's lights out - or hers, for that matter. He had known all along that she had some major problem, and that the problem was another guy shouldn't have come as a surprise. Not that it mattered much - he'd just shake Philadelphia's dust off his feet and begin his search somewhere else.

So he walked out on her (and on the tab), picked up his suitcase from the coach station lockers and set off to find a cheap hotel in a central location.

That evening - he was on his bed, fully dressed, legs crossed and hands clasped behind his head - his cell phone rang. He glanced at the screen; it was Lisa, so he ignored it. A few minutes later it beeped - a text message that read: 'We need to talk.'

_Do we?_ He tossed the phone onto the bedside table without answering the message. Half an hour later - he was just wondering whether to check out the bars to see if the drinks tasted familiar - another message came in: 'Please.'

Oh, okay, if she was going to be _polite_ about it ... He texted her the hotel's address and his room number, and then he went for a quick shower and shave. He doubted that his interview with Lisa would last long - she was a woman of few, sharp words - or lead to any change in his plans, and he was reasonably sure that it would leave him with a desire for a strong drink and uncomplicated female company, which would be a lot easier to obtain if he smelled and looked clean. He was barely dressed when there was a knock at the door. He opened it, but held onto the leaf with one hand while he leaned on the frame with the other, effectively barring her way. From there, he glowered down at her. She was dressed casually in jeans and flat shoes, so she must have come from home.

She took a deep breath. "Can I come in?"

His point made, he stood aside. She came in and looked around, unable to hide her dismay. It was definitely not the Brunel, and he couldn't say that he was enthusiastic about having to share the bathroom with a colony of roaches, but he was pretty sure that he must have seen worse in his previous life.

"I'm sorry I overreacted," she said, coming straight to the point. "I didn't expect you here."

"I got that," he replied, looking at her wryly. "You've got 'responsibilities'." He made the word sound like an insult. "A job, a daughter, a model boyfriend. Your holiday flirt doesn't fit in."

She closed her eyes for a moment, and then she said, "There's no boyfriend."

"Girlfriend, then. Someone you don't want me to meet, and the fear that I could do so almost made you pee your panties today."

That got her bristles up. " _You_ \- aren't my boyfriend. Even if there was someone else - but there isn't - I'd have nothing to feel guilty about."

"You spend hundreds of dollars to see me for a few days, you adjust your working schedule accordingly and organise a babysitter, you spend every waking moment and quite a few sleeping ones with me when you're in Bristol, and then you quibble about terminology? You should go for the Oval Office; you're predestined for it!"

She chewed her lower lip. "You and me - it wouldn't work. We'd just hurt each other."

"You mean if we had a real relationship with sex, saw each other regularly, lived together," he posited, striking up a 'reasonable' tone.

She looked at him warily, mistrusting his seeming understanding, before she assented, "Yes, exactly. It - it would work for some time but then ..."

He didn't let her complete her thought. "But this, this _doesn't_ hurt: you coming to see me in Bristol, spending time with me, leading me on, and then pushing me away when I upset your comfortable life here?"

She closed her eyes for a moment. When she reopened them, they glistened. She placed a hand on his arm. "I've hurt you. I'm sorry."

"It's not your fault," he muttered, placing his hand over hers. And he meant it. Compared to what he'd done to Sharon, her record was as good as spotless. She had all along tried to dampen his expectations, pretending that she was in England on business until he had called her bluff, refusing to get involved in anything sexual after that first time, not divulging personal information and showing little interest in his private life. It had been clear to anyone who had wanted to read the signs that she'd had no intention whatsoever of admitting him into her life, no matter how far he opened up his to her. If he'd chosen to ignore all the warnings, then the blame was on him. Anyway, there wasn't much harm done - a dead end in Philadelphia wasn't the end of the world. Even if she had been more welcoming he doubted he would have stayed more than a week. He'd just take off straightaway; that was all.

He was about to say something soothing to that effect when he noticed that her whole stance, her body language had changed. She was white as a sheet, looking at him as though she'd seen a ghost.

"Are you okay?" he asked slowly, softly, so as not to increase her agitation.

"I ...no!" And she turned round, practically running from the room. Which was a pity, because he hadn't wanted the conversation to end without pointing out that he wasn't heartbroken and that she was overestimating her meaning in his life. And it was odd, very odd, because she was not really the type to run away. She was more the 'punch the guy in the guts, grind your heels into his intestines, and then walk away while he's writhing on the ground' type.

And that is why he's here, outside a nuthouse named Mayfield, trying to figure out whether the puzzle actually exists or if Lisa Cuddy is just plain loopy. She could be paranoid and an outpatient, but what outpatient comes in on a Sunday just before eight p.m. for treatment? And then there's the guy with her. If she was the patient being brought by him, wouldn't _he_ have been driving? Who is the man, anyway?

He'd got a reasonably good look at him when the man got into Lisa's car. Medium height, thick brown hair, about the same age as Lisa, features that must have been too handsome to be true when he was younger, but are going to seed now in middle age. Well-dressed: his idea of Sunday casual is a pair of linen pants, a light shirt and a blazer, and expensive loafers. A style that a career woman like Lisa doubtless appreciates: he isn't anything to be ashamed of at work-related dinner parties or at a Sunday brunch.

Although he'd been keeping watch outside since noon, he didn't see the man arrive at Lisa's place, which means that he's been there since morning at the very least. Maybe he lives with Lisa, although the name plate next to the doorbell only mentions Lisa and her daughter Rachel.

He decides to go back to the apartment to reconnoitre. Whatever Lisa and the man are here for, it's unlikely to take less than an hour. After programming the Satnav (which cost him more than the entire car) he's off.

Back in Lisa's street he roots around in the car for some excuse to go up to her apartment. The only object that will serve is a medical book on neuro-psychology that he brought along to kill time while he waited. He grabs it and goes to the front door of the old red-brick building. He had her down for a detached house sort of person, but if the story about the collapsing house is true, she may have opted for something more solid this time around. There's a difference between this house and the surrounding ones, other than the colour of the door. While all of the surrounding houses have a series of four steps leading up to the front door, this one has a ramp, wheel-chair access. He rings Lisa's bell, just to be on the safe side, but no one answers. Then he tries the door. It won't open, of course. In this sort of neighbourhood the residents won't want riff-raff off the streets waltzing in and out the doors. So he rings the neighbour's bell, hoping that they'll trustingly open the door with the buzzer.

But a female voice calls out through the intercom, "Who is it?"

He gets out his British accent and dusts it off. "My name is Thomas Lawrence. I want to drop something off for Dr Cuddy."

There's a buzz, and he can push the door open. It opens into a dark hallway, with a carpeted flight of stairs leading up, but in the gloom at the end of the hall there's the silver glimmer of an elevator. He takes it to the top floor.

Any hope he has of being able to break into Lisa's place fades when he leaves the elevator. The neighbour, a woman about his age, overweight, with a perm and a pair of atrociously colourful glasses, is standing in her doorway waiting for him.

"Hello," she says, but it's a question. Bloody neighbourhood watch.

"Good evening," he answers. He has decided on the 'fellow professional' routine, with a bit of British foppishness thrown in. The more intriguing he is, the longer this neighbour will talk to him and the greater his chance of gleaning bits of information. "I'm a colleague of Dr Cuddy's, Lawrence is my name. I was to drop something off for her today," he waggles the book, "but I'm afraid I'm a tad late."

"If you like you can leave it with me, and I'll give it to her when she comes," the woman says.

"That would be lov-el-eh," he says. "Absolutely topping." He's laying it on too thick, sounding like the offspring of a Wodehouse twat and an Enid Blyton brat, but the neighbour loves it. She beams at him as she holds out her hand.

"Are you from England?" she asks. "I love the accent!"

"Yes, just over for the hols. It's awfully awkward that I've missed Lisa. Do you know when she'll be back?"

There's a scraping from inside the woman's apartment and a shape appears behind her. A wheelchair, a very small one, with a child inside: a girl, dark-haired and dark-eyed, with oddly familiar features. "Louisa, who is it?"

"Someone for your mom," Louisa answers. "Go back inside, honey."

His brain whirrs, synapses connecting, information being sifted, even as his mouth says, "You, my dear child, must be Rachel. How d'you do?" Now he sounds like Willy Wonka, only creepier. Lisa's child is a cripple?

"Who are you?" the child asks, staring up at him warily.

"I'm a pal of your mother's. But I fear I have been remiss, appearing tardily despite her warning that she would egress from her abode." He waggles his eyebrows at the child. Anything to keep those two out here where he can talk to them.

"You talk funny."

"I'm late; she's gone," he summarises.

Rachel giggles. "She's bringing Wilson back to Mayfield."

"And Wilson is your feline friend. Your cat," he pretends to surmise.

"No!" Rachel is slightly indignant. "Wilson is a 'person' name."

"Oh, reall-eh!" he says. "I wouldn't call my son 'Wilson'. I'd give him a normal name, like Tom, or Dick, or Harry."

"You mean, like Harry Potter?" Rachel beams.

He nods. "Precisely!"

"Rachel," Louisa reprimands, "not everyone wants to talk about Harry Potter all day long."

"Wilson is called James, like Harry's dad," Rachel says, scowling at Louisa.

He decides that Harry Potter is an underestimated fount of useful mental associations and of great benefit to the conversational powers of seven year olds.

"Go back inside, Rachel," Louisa says, thrusting the book into the girl's lap. She watches the girl wheel herself away, and then she turns back to him. "Poor kid!" she says. It's plain that she has sent the child away so she can talk with him.

He leans in a little. He has seen that gleam in women's eyes before and it begs to be exploited. Who the hell is James Wilson? But he'll have to approach the question elliptically. "Was the child born that way?" He scratches an eyebrow, suggesting curiosity along with a dose of British reticence.

"Oh, no! The ceiling of her room collapsed on her when she was three. She'll never be able to walk again. But she's very brave about it, very brave indeed!"

"Ah, yes. Lisa didn't mention that. None of my business, of course," he adds, managing to convey hurt that he isn't in Lisa's confidence.

"Oh, she doesn't talk about it." She lowers her voice conspiratorially and leans towards him. "Lisa's ex-boyfriend drove into their house with his car, you know. He was very moody, apparently, and he didn't deal very well with the separation. I guess she feels guilty about it, though I really don't see how that's her fault. I mean, no one reckons with _that_ sort of a thing when they get into a relationship!" Louisa looks back furtively into her apartment, and then she steps out, closing the door behind her. "The child doesn't know though. The official story is that a hurricane brought the roof down."

He's looking at her somewhat sceptically. If Lisa doesn't talk about it - and he can't see her confiding in Louisa - and Rachel doesn't know, how the hell does this garrulous hen know about it?

Louisa notices his gaze. "Lisa's mother told me all about it; she lives in Princeton and comes over every month or so to babysit. Terrible business, it must have been. Lisa ran a _whole hospital_ in Princeton - you may have heard of it: Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital. It's quite renowned, apparently." She looks at him questioningly.

He remembers only just in time that he's posing as a doctor and nods sagely, which suffices to keep Louisa talking. "He was one of her employees - owed her a lot, Arlene says - but then he nearly killed her and crippled her daughter. She had to quit her job, because the poor child was in hospital for such a long time. Lisa is a wonderful woman, but she _does_ have a terrible taste in men."

She looks at him expectantly, as if expecting assent from him for this sweeping statement. He says, "Well, everyone can make a mistake."

"Oh, Arlene says Lisa has _always_ been like that - the guys she's dated were always the rotten eggs in the basket. I met that James Wilson today - they were coming in when I was just going out ..."

That was probably no coincidence, he thinks.

" ... and he seemed so nice, so polite - holds the door for me and greets me in such a friendly manner - but do you know what Mayfield is?" She puts in a rhetorical pause. "It's a _psychiatric institution_ , a loony bin. That man is mad! Now you tell me, what sensible woman would bring home a man like that, with a child in the house?"

"Louisa! I know you're talking about me!" Rachel calls, her voice muffled through the door. "I don't like it when you talk about me. You're not to talk about me to strangers!"

"That child," Louisa says, rolling her eyes, "is too old for her age. But what can you expect, when she can't run around like other kids? Well, I hope to see you again, it was nice meeting you."

He nods a goodbye and goes back to the elevator, mulling over what she told him.

* * *

The hotel doesn't have wireless LAN access, so he has to take his laptop somewhere where he has free access. He finds a diner that'll fulfil his needs and spends an interesting three hours researching James Wilson and the tentacles he extends into Lisa Cuddy's life.

It's James Wilson _MD_ , to be precise, and the guy is quite a big shot in oncology, it seems. He has any number of papers to his name, is a much-sought conference speaker, head of department in a teaching hospital - that just happens to be PPTH, Lisa's former hospital. And he's been there some seventeen years, which means Lisa gave him the job. A former employee of Lisa's - what a coincidence! PPTH's oncology home page informs patients and other interested persons that Dr Wilson is on a sabbatical and that Dr Chung has taken over his duties as temporary head of department until further notice.

His next address is, a site that rates physicians and allows patients to leave comments on their medical providers. James Evan Wilson has an astounding number of reviews and rates 4.5 of 5 stars. A close examination of his reviews reveals that there was a drop in popularity from 4.9 of 5 (about four years ago) to less than 4.0 during the course of the last year. Had previous reviews ranted of his medical competence, his ability to listen, his personal care of his patients, his empathy with patients and their loved ones, etc., more recent ones complained that he seemed tired, unmotivated and absentminded. One patient remarked quite openly that he 'reeked of alcohol at 10 a.m.'

He scrolls back to check when the downward streak began - about two years ago. Alcoholism normally takes some time to reach the point that patient care suffers. James Wilson has probably been drinking considerably longer than that - over five years, maybe? There's one review that catches his eye: the patient, a female, sings Dr Wilson's praises to the heavens and hopes that after three disappointing ventures into matrimony he will find a loving, caring person who appreciates his wonderful qualities. There's little doubt about who the patient thinks that 'loving, caring person' should be. But, three disappointments? The man has been married and divorced _thrice_? Some kind of a Bluebeard, undoubtedly.

Next he googles 'car crash Princeton 2011'. It's distressing, how carelessly people drive; he has to narrow down the roughly 1.3 million hits, so he adds 'house', and then 'injury' and 'child'. A bit of weeding and pruning, and he has two articles from August 2011 from an online newspaper with a searchable archive:

_**Hurricane Irene lashes Princeton** _   
_Hurricane Irene whipped through the streets of Princeton last night, leaving behind a trail of devastation and injury. There was severe flooding in several parts of the city, and hundreds of trees were downed, leaving residents without power for hours. There has also been one case of severe injury as part of a house collapsed, trapping a three year old under it. The child was brought to Princeton General Hospital where her condition is said to be critical, but stable._

And so on ...

Two days later:

_**House collapse that cripples child not connected to Hurricane Irene**_?  
 _The house that collapsed in suburban Princeton two days ago during Hurricane Irene, crippling a three year old, may have had structural weaknesses. As we reported in May, the house, residence of the dean of Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital, was the target of an act of domestic violence that shocked the whole community: an employee of PPTH drove his car into the walls of the house, injuring himself severely and causing large-scale damage to the wall. The house was subsequently cleared for habitation by a construction company, but after this week's incident, there has been wide-spread criticism of the company for not recognizing that the supporting beams of the child's bedroom were damaged by the incident. The owner's solicitor has been quoted as saying that he is considering legal steps against the construction company.  
According to unconfirmed reports, the car assault that damaged the building was not motivated by workplace issues, but by private tensions between the employee, an internationally renowned physician, and the dean, with whom he is said to have been involved in a personal relationship. Neighbors and colleagues of the dean have expressed their sympathy and support.  
Mr Sanford Wells, CEO of Biotech Princeton and chairman of the PPTH board, said, "Our prayers are with Dr Cuddy, her wonderful daughter and her family, and Dr Cuddy may be assured of our full support."  
Asked what consequences the board drew from this case regarding the hospital's fraternizing policy, Mr Wells stated, "This is not, and I repeat, _ not _the time to debate the advisability of mixing private and professional relationships. I think we are all agreed in condemning domestic violence in every form. Should the person in question be convicted, the hospital will take all necessary steps to terminate his contract. As long as there is no verdict, however, the hospital will not comment."_  
According to Mr Wells, by suspending the employee in question the hospital is not pre-empting his possible conviction, but reacting to long-term issues related to substance abuse. Mr Wells denied that there would be consequences for the hospital's employee selection process, saying that the board and leading hospital staff were unanimous in agreeing that although the alleged perpetrator's mental state was fragile before the incident, there had been no indication of incipient violence. He also refuted the suggestion that Dr Cuddy's personal involvement with her employee, who has a reputation for being brilliant but difficult, had helped him to obtain employment at the hospital. "Dr ...'s (name withheld for legal reasons) contract with the hospital predates his relationship with Dr Cuddy by roughly ten years. And anyone who knows Dr Cuddy is aware that she does not shy away from employing challenging persons as long as their skills and abilities enrich the hospital."

When he returns to his hotel room, Lisa is inside waiting for him. If this were the Brunel, he'd congratulate her on some smooth talking, but the teen downstairs at reception looks as though ten bucks would convince him to hand over the spare key to the Queen of Darkness, should she say she was his wife.

She's livid. "What the _hell_ do you think you're doing?"

She's a sight to behold when she's really, truly mad, but he isn't really in the mood to appreciate the view. What he has found out is too depressing. "You're a moron," he says as he places the backpack with his laptop on the table.

"Right," she says, brushing it aside. " _You_ nearly ran me off the road, and then you interrogated my daughter. Stay. Out. Of. My. Life!"

"I was nowhere near you - I kept a safe distance. And what's wrong with me having a nice chat with your kid?"

She laughs - a low, sarcastic chuckle. "You don't _do_ nice. You have an ulterior motive for everything. And here's news for you: being stalked by creepy oddballs makes other drivers nervous, and then bad things happen. Like car crashes."

"Hmmm." He screws up the lower part of his face as though considering this. "So what do you think made James Wilson nervous when he crashed through your house?"

If he was in any doubt about the veracity of his theory, it vanishes at the sight of her reaction. All the tautness that anger lent to her frame vanishes in a sudden puff; she sinks into herself, seeming to lose inches of her height within seconds, and all that self-assured confidence turns into trembling uncertainty. It's not a pretty sight, this disintegration of her persona, this strip-tease of her soul. She sinks down onto the bed swallowing hard, her hands kneading her purse. When she looks back up at him, it is with hunted eyes.

"That ..." She swallows again, in so strained a manner that her whole throat quivers. "That's not what happened."

"You're right: he _wasn't_ nervous; he was drunk. _Here's_ what happened: you're dean of a dinky teaching hospital that's surrounded by bigger, better, richer ones. You need to give your hospital a cutting edge over the others, otherwise it'll soon be over: your teaching accreditation will be withdrawn, funding will decrease, before you know it you'll be fusing with Princeton General or, God forbid, Trenton. So you woo a promising young oncologist. You promise him his own department, a reasonable number of fellows, a reasonable amount of freedom. And you ignore what you know and others know and what is getting him blackballed along the coast: he's got a bit of a drinking problem. Sometimes it's better, sometimes it's worse, sometimes it leads to a divorce. But it doesn't bother you because you aren't thinking of marrying him - yet. And in the hospital you manage to keep him under control.

"He's a damn handsome guy; he's clever and he's funny; he's a brilliant oncologist who is popular with the patients. You have lunch with him on occasion, you grow closer; sometime after his third divorce you end up in bed with him. It's one of his dry periods, and for a time everything goes well. But then he relapses, and when he's drunk, he's different. He isn't the sweet caring guy you love; he's edgy, unpredictable, and violent. You've got a kid and very little patience, so you dump him. But he won't let it go, will he? He stalks you, and one day he sees something that sets him off: you with another guy. And he crashes his car into your house, nearly killing your kid."

She has been staring at him in horror, clutching the mattress with her hands, her knuckles stark and white, but at that she interrupts for the first time. "You're totally wrong. And Rachel's injury has nothing to do with it."

"No," he says mercilessly, "she was hit by Hurricane Irene and human stupidity, but neither would have mattered if James - or do you call him Jim? - hadn't damaged the structure. And though _rationally_ you may know that it isn't his fault, emotionally it's difficult to separate what he did from what happened to Rachel, isn't it? Just as you find it difficult to separate what _you_ did - dumping him - from what _he_ did to you by wrecking your house. Because if you didn't, if you could see his behaviour objectively for what it is, you wouldn't be harbouring him again."

She buries her face in her hands at that, her shoulders shaking.

"With what fairy tale do you fool yourself? That he's finally getting treatment and is better? That he didn't mean to hurt you? That he has changed? That he has been punished enough?" He looks down at her dispassionately. "People don't change, Lisa."

"You've got it wrong," she says quietly from the bed. "Wilson didn't drive his car through my house." So that's what she calls him. "And he's just a friend."

He doesn't know why he's trying. Victims of abuse are prone to fall back into patterns of behaviour that perpetuate the abuse. They'll make excuses for the abuser, blame themselves, blame the circumstances, but they won't look the truth in the face: that they have wasted years of love and sacrifice on someone who doesn't deserve it. He walks over to the window and looks out blindly. She'll take James Wilson in again, at first as a friend, but sooner or later the hormones, pheromones and what-have-you will take over and they'll be an item again. And things will go well for a while, until he relapses, she freaks and the cycle starts all over again. And one day she'll have pushed her luck too hard and she'll end in the morgue. Morosely he recalls something he read once on a site called _Stupid Statistics_ : getting married is one thousand times more likely to end lethally than jogging alone in the woods.

"Right! This is all one big coincidence: he was your employee, he has substance abuse issues, you feel obliged to help him although you don't work in the same place any more." He shrugs. "It's not my problem ..."

"You're damn right it isn't!" She is recovering from her shock.

" ... but you know as well as I do how this will end. You know that he'll turn ballistic again, otherwise you wouldn't be so worried about him meeting me. If you honestly thought that this friendship thing could work or that he has changed, you wouldn't be in a panic because I've turned up here. But how long can you keep this up - building your life around not freaking him out? Next time it could be something totally harmless - just someone you smile at by chance. Or he decides that your child is a threat to your relationship. Or your job."

He perches his ass on the narrow ledge that poses as a window sill and musters her. She has extracted a tissue from her purse and is dabbing at her eyes. If he were nice, he'd tell her that her make-up is smudged and that she looks like a racoon, but she'll notice soon enough when she sees herself at home in her bathroom mirror. She stands up from the bed.

He scratches the side of his nose and focuses on a stain on the ceiling. "You know that there are self-help groups for victims of abuse."

"Are you ... advising me to join a self-help group?" You'd think he'd suggested something esoteric, like laying cards or reading the entrails of a ritually slaughtered sheep.

"It's said to be helpful." His experience with group therapy in Maudsley Hospital was that it was anything _but_ helpful, and she doesn't seem the type to listen patiently to others whining about their problems, but on the other hand she isn't likely to greet the only other sensible option with any more enthusiasm. Still, he has to try. "Or you should consider therapy," he says. And waits for the inevitable explosion where she tells him that _he's_ the psychopath who needs his head examined.

"I _am_ in therapy, you idiot!"

He tears his eyes off that interesting stain to look at her. She is planted in front of him now, looking at him with wonder. Now that he's half seated, they are practically eye-to-eye. "You are?" he croaks.

She counts off on her fingers, "A car drove into my house while I was in it, it collapsed on my daughter during a hurricane, my daughter was in hospital for two months and came out a paraplegic, I lost my job - of _course_ I'm in therapy!"

"And what does your therapist say about Wilson?"

She acknowledges the hit with a quirk of her eyebrow. "She says that I'm an idiot." She puts a tentative hand on his arm. "You care, don't you? You're a sweet guy." She sighs. "But you're wrong about Wilson."

He leans his cheek against the cool window pane and squints out. Outside, a car honks. In the next doorway, during a casual handshake between two strangers, a packet furtively changes owners. Two houses down, garish neon lights advertise an establishment with table dance.

Wilson's a lucky guy to inspire such unfailing trust and confidence, a very lucky guy.

She says so quietly that he almost doesn't hear it, "And I think you're wrong about people not changing."

When she reaches up to give him a farewell hug, he pulls her in to him and buries his face in her neck. It's the saddest thing he can remember doing in the three years of his existence, because he knows that for the sake of her safety this can't continue - _any_ of this, including her visits to Bristol -, and chances are that the next he hears of her will be her obituary.


	11. Riddles in the Dark I

Knowledge is one thing, acting on it is quite another. When Lisa texts him a few days later suggesting that they meet for coffee, he doesn't reply, but at three, the time she suggested, he finds himself lurking outside the coffee shop. Fifteen minutes later he's inside, sliding into the seat opposite hers. She smiles in welcome, as though she never doubted he'd show. Is he that predictable? Somehow, they leave with hands loosely clasped, and he enjoys the feeling of her small smooth hand in his rough weathered paw.

From there it's a short step to what he guesses could pass for a date. It's hubris, of course, to expect something as complex and harrowing as an entire meal to go well just because he survived three-quarters of an hour in a coffee shop. The dress shirt and tie that he forced himself to don seem to choke him, the formal setting grates on his nerves, and before he knows it, he's terrorising the staff and aiming barbs at Lisa. He gets cold feet in the middle - he wishes it was consideration for her safety or her well-being that guides his feet, but it's plain panic at what he's getting himself into - so he excuses himself to go to the bathroom and escapes via the back exit. There he lurks in the shadows; after half an hour she appears at the entrance of the restaurant, the toss of her head and the briskness of her stride radiating anger. He expects her to drive off in a cloud of umbrage, but after she has slammed the door of the car behind her with a vengeance nothing happens.

He peers through the darkness, trying to see what she's doing, but the car is as much in the shadows as he is. He waits - maybe she's texting someone or switching to more comfortable shoes for driving. Still no movement. Finally he sneaks closer and peers into the car; she's sitting slumped over the steering wheel, all fight gone out of her. He raps on the window. She starts up, but when she sees it's him, she leans over to open the door, wiping over her cheek surreptitiously with the other hand. He folds himself into the passenger seat and stares out through the windscreen, tugging at his lower lip.

Finally, he forces himself to look at her. "What the hell are we doing?" he mutters.

She huffs out a long breath of air. "I have no idea." Shaking her head as though to clear it, she turns to him, some of her old energy returning. "Look, I'm sorry I've got you into this. I didn't mean to ..." She breaks off, leaning her forehead on her fingertips.

"Do I get another chance?" he asks.

"You really want to continue with this madness?" Lisa asks.

When he nods, she pulls a pen and a notebook out of her purse, scribbles something and hands the page to him. "Tomorrow evening at eight sharp," she orders. "Now go - I've had enough for tonight."

The next evening he arrives early at the venue she noted down; it's in a seedier part of town than he'd have expected of her, and the clientele that's entering as he arrives probably doesn't patronise country clubs or play golf of a Sunday morning. That's just fine with him, but he's finding it difficult to picture Lisa in here on a regular basis slumming it. Rock music spills out onto the sidewalk as he pulls open the door. Inside there's a bar, some tables along the walls and - a dance floor.

"No way, Jose!" he mutters. She can't be serious about this! He's never danced, isn't sure whether he can. It's not a question of hitting the right rhythm - he's certain he can handle that - but a matter of keeping his balance. He briefly considers legging it, but after his miserable performance last night, it isn't really an option.

Lisa breezes in at ten past eight in a stunning red dress with a flaring skirt, cut low in front and even lower behind, and her hair falling in loose curls onto her shoulders. She's looking about ten years younger than she is, her entire posture conveying eager anticipation as she joins him at the bar, her eyes alight and a rather goofy smile on her lips.

"Do you come here often?" he asks curiously.

She shakes her head. "One of the nursing staff told me about this place. The band covers the 70's and 80's."

"I've noticed!"

"Oh, come on! That's The Who, The Rolling Stones, Janis Joplin ...,"

"They aren't playing The Who," he grumbles. They're playing 'Staying Alive,' and he's ready to shoot himself.

She ignores him. "I haven't done this in years!" she says, scanning the dance floor.

"No loss," he gripes, earning himself a slap on the arm.

"It's fun," she insists, her foot already tapping in time to the rhythm.

"Then how come you haven't done it in years?"

"My boyfriends ... weren't the dancing type," she says, her brow furrowed slightly. "And after Rachel's accident, I had no time and no inclination."

It's time to play the cripple card. "I'm not sure whether I can do this," he says, giving his leg a significant glance.

"You don't have to do anything except sway a bit in time to the music," Lisa pronounces. "Most of the guys suck at it - no one will notice."

The band starts into 'Dancing in the Dark'. Lisa's eyes light up, while he rolls his eyes in dismay. Sliding off the bar stool she marches determinedly onto the dance floor, turning to crook a finger at him when he hesitates. He puts on a long-suffering martyr air as he slouches behind her, but she's impervious to his grouchiness. After a few minutes he decides that maybe this dancing thing isn't half bad; he really doesn't have to do anything other than shift his weight from foot to foot and take Lisa's hand every now and then to twirl her around. That makes her dress flare up, exposing her shapely legs. Lisa takes care of everything else, stepping around him as she shakes, twirls and swings her ass in time to the music, exposing enough heaving cleavage to keep him more than happy. Lisa's awareness of him is limited; she's enjoying herself with a youthful abandon that he hasn't seen in her to date.

He tips his head. "Why'd you bring me? You don't need me here."

"If I was here alone, the guys would keep trying to hit on me. So, yeah, I do need you here. Having fun?" she tosses over her shoulder as she prances a few steps away from him shaking her hips.

He isn't sure whether he's having fun, but his dick likes what he sees.

"Did you know," he says, closing the distance between them until her ass is a mere inches from his groin, "that there are fifty-seven metaphors that use dancing to refer to sex?" He's picked a random number, but he's sure he can recite twenty at the very least off the top of his head.

"You're supposed to use your legs, not your tongue," she reprimands.

"I'm good with my tongue," he says suggestively, leaning forward over her shoulder to leer down her cleavage.

She moves half a step back, grinding her ass into his groin, making him want to throw his head back and groan at the sensation. "Are you?" she says smirking.

His brain, deprived of its oxygen supply, refuses to come up with a witty repartee. When the music changes to 'Wonderful Tonight', he pulls her flush to him, his hands sliding down her back towards her tush. Her arms crawl around his neck.

"I can play this game too," he tells her as he tugs her in far enough that she can feel his hard-on.

She reciprocates by giving her hips a little twist that sends her pubis gyrating into his manly parts. "I'm better at it."

He tries to distract himself before he loses it completely and does something that'll get them thrown out. "A dolphin's penis," he says, "is prehensile and can swivel. He can use it like a hand to explore objects. And _barnacles_..."

"I think I know that one," she interrupts. It's a pity since that's one of his favourite factoids. "Is it possible for you to open your mouth without saying something that is either offensive or a reference to sexual organs?"

"Most facts about the animal kingdom are about sex. Species have to procreate in order to dominate the ecological niche they live in. Nature is full of sleazy sex."

"It's possible to talk about procreation without constantly referencing the male sexual organ - or its female counterpart," she says acerbically.

"Be my guest!" he challenges her.

She bites her lower lip in concentration. "How about this: sea horses are monogamous in the wild. The male not only cares for the offspring but also carries and births the young. They have a complex courtship ritual that includes changing colours, swimming snout to snout, and holding tails."

He blows up his cheeks thoughtfully and expels the air in one short plop. "Judging by your choice of factoids, you're looking for a partner over whom you'll have exclusive rights, who'll care for your kid, and who is prepared to change for your sake," he interprets.

She rolls her eyes. " _Everyone_ wants a partner like that, but you're reading too much into this. Rachel's class did a project on marine life, and she chose sea horses." She gives him a challenging smile. "Your turn."

It's no easy task to find a factoid without penises, not when Freud is dancing the polka on what's left of his brain, but as she begins to smirk in triumph he comes up with, "Galapagos giant tortoises take forty years to reach sexual maturity. When males meet in the mating season, the male with the longer ... neck gets the female."

"And that wasn't a euphemism?" she says sceptically.

"Now whose mind is in the gutter?" he asks, giving her ass a squeeze.

She tugs his hands back up a few inches. "My _mind_ ," she says pointedly, "is not down there."

"Your turn," he says.

"O-kay." Her face is scrunched up in thought. "Here: clown fish can change gender. In a group the biggest fish is the female. When she dies, the highest-ranking male changes its gender and becomes the female. Okay, Freud, give that one a spin so that it applies to my hopes and aspirations."

"The group represents the hospital, and the female is the dean. You're the highest ranking male. When your dean retires, you want to take his place." Her face is priceless.

It takes another two dances until she softens enough to agree to leave, two dances through which he suffers in uncomfortably tight jeans picturing his balls changing colour (rather like courting sea horses) while he feeds her with useless trivia.

"You do realise that the female hyena's pseudo-penis isn't exactly a turn-on?" she says as they make their way to her car, but her dilated pupils belie her words, as does the way her breath hitches when, walking hand-in-hand, his thumb caresses her wrist.

The horizontal tango they dance later that night in his hotel more than makes up for the evening's suffering.

* * *

He gets a job in a restaurant in Chinatown; nothing great, but at least he isn't using up his travel budget anymore. Some days, when he gets back to the hotel after work, Lisa is there. She never stays long, because he comes back late while she has to get up early, and they never discuss whatever it is they have. Their roles seem to have changed: she has abandoned all second thoughts or inhibitions about getting involved with him, while he feels guilty about the danger he's getting her into should James find out about him. Because he doesn't doubt that although she's with him now, in the long run she'll be returning to James Wilson MD. Anyone who is foolish enough to hold on to a man who ran his car through her house has to be insanely hormonal about the guy, and fucking a holiday flirt won't change those long-term behaviour patterns or pheromone addiction. If he were to stay around and they took a shot at a serious relationship, then things might be different: she might be persuaded to give J.E.W. the boot, and he would certainly do his best to protect her and make sure that Dr Wilson knew precisely what would head his way if he came near Lisa again. Or if he _thought_ of coming near Lisa again. Or if he thought of _thinking_ of coming near Lisa again. But he, Pete, is just here for as long as it takes him to put together a little stash of money, and then he'll take the wreck of a car that he's bought and check out his past.

He has decided to start off with renowned teaching hospitals along the East Coast: Dr Weller thought that he'd had medical training; Dr Weller said that he was a genius. Ergo, chances are that he got his medical training at some reasonably prominent place. He's decided on the East Coast because he's here already. He isn't sure yet how he'll figure out which school he attended, because even if he recognises a building or two, chances are that it's because he's seen pictures of them, not because he's been there in person. But maybe there'll be archives with yearbooks or old photo IDs, and very, very maybe he'll run into someone who will recognise him, because somewhere, at some medical school in the country, there has to be some member of the teaching staff who attended medical school with him. He's been working for three weeks now; another week and he should have the money for a short spree up the coast.

But Lisa doesn't know that. Lisa still thinks he's here because of her, since he hasn't told her that he has amnesia and is looking for his roots. Which, now that he comes to think of it, probably isn't quite fair. It was fine as long as she was pushing him away, but now that she's stopped doing that he's probably creating the same kind of false expectations that he aroused in Sharon. In this case his behaviour is even worse, because he's allowing her to believe that she's the reason for his presence in Philly; he's wilfully deceiving her, even though he knows that it's one of the reasons she's sleeping with him. He'd never thought he was that kind of a guy; what had happened with Sharon was regrettable and on some level he'd screwed up, but it hadn't been intentional. This time, however, ...

Then again, although her behaviour seems to indicate involvement, she's stand-offish on some level. So far, she has never suggested that he come to her place. Her daughter might be the reason - she seems the kind of mother who won't introduce a new love interest until that interest has become a fixed item in her life. There is something in her behaviour, however, that negates this simple explanation. She should be talking to him about everyday home things that anyone regardless of education or profession can understand. Instead, she skirts around her private life, preferring to relate anecdotes from her work life. He has no problems following her trials and tribulations, but that's only because he has a medical background that she's unaware of. The fact that she's inundating him with work talk which she must assume that he can't understand indicates that she's hell bent on keeping him off her private life. Other than protecting her daughter, why would she keep him at a stand-off?

About twenty-five reasons come to mind, most of them starting and ending with him being totally unsuitable as a partner for someone of her calibre: there's his personality, his (lack of) background, his disability, his financial status, his lack of domesticity, his abrasiveness, etc., etc. There's also the possibility that she's distracting herself with a little affair so that she doesn't fall back into Dr Wilson's arms quite so quickly, but without any intention of following up.

Whatever it is, it's a good thing. He'd rather not have her go all broken-hearted on him when he leaves, which would add to his growing discomfort at _using_ her, because that's what this is, this relationship that can't go anywhere and will be over once he has found his past. For although he has no idea what he'll find out about himself, he has little hope that his former self is any more acceptable as a partner than his present self.

So, unpleasant though it will be, he has no choice but to tell her that he's leaving and to end the romance (or whatever Lisa considers this thing to be), and the sooner he does it, the better for everyone concerned.

There is one thing he _can_ do for her before he goes, and that is wave a metaphorical pistol under J. E. Wilson's nose. It won't do much good if the fellow short-circuits again in a major way, but sometimes it helps people to rein in their baser instincts if they know that a third party is aware of them und just waiting to pounce on them should they step out of line. He'd go and tackle James at Mayfield, but psychiatric institutions tend to check with patients whether they are prepared to receive potential visitors, and James has no reason to consent to see a Peter Barnes from Bristol. So he has no choice but to await the next weekend when James will doubtless be released for the day to stay with Lisa once again. Lisa confirms his assumption by informing him that she won't have time for him on Saturday.

On Saturday he takes up position within sight of Lisa's apartment block and waits. Around lunchtime, Lisa, Rachel and James arrive, and he watches as James moves to the boot of the car, gets Rachel's wheelchair out and unfolds it for all the world as if he did it every day. No sign of guilt, no trace of 'I'm the creep who put this kid into a wheelchair'. No, Jimmy has all his limbs intact; Jimmy doesn't suffer from panic attacks when strangers loom too close to him; Jimmy kept his job at PPTH - why the hell wasn't he convicted?

He waits till mid-afternoon, and then he sends a text message to Lisa. "Injury at work - no insurance, cuz no work permit. Urgent! Come to hotel." Within two minutes she shoots out of the door carrying a small emergency case, and pulls away from the curb with screeching tires.

Once she's gone he walks to the front door and rings her bell. Over the intercom he hears Rachel's voice. "Hello? Hello?"

He doesn't answer her, and a moment later she presses the opener anyway. Kids are so dumb! As he walks over to the elevator he can hear her voice coming down the stairwell - she must be waiting at the open door of the apartment. "Mom must've forgotten something."

When he steps out of the elevator on the top floor, she's hovering outside on the landing in her wheelchair, her eagerness giving way to confusion and slow recognition when she sees him.

"Aren't you the man who came here before, with a book? Mom isn't here - she just left."

"I know," he says shortly and pushes past her into the apartment.

"Hey!" she calls indignantly, but he can't be bothered to cater to the sensibilities of little brats just now.

Once inside, he stops to orient himself. He's in a hallway with doors branching off; through an open door on his left he can see an eat-in kitchen with a small table and three chairs. The door on his right opens into the living room. He can see bookshelves from where he's standing, and windows that open out onto the rear of the building, and an armchair. He moves to the doorway and looks inside. The Other Guy, James Wilson, is sitting on the couch, staring in concentration at a chess board. He must have sensed a presence, because he says, "Rachel, I think you're cheating." And then he looks up and sees him.

The result is rather gratifying. He's always found the expression 'to see a ghost' risible, but in this case it seems to apply. James, Jimmy, Jim, or whatever, turns a nasty shade of yellowish-green. His hands, poised a moment earlier over the board, make little flapping movements. Those thick eyebrows make a concerted effort to meet up above his nose, while his lips open and close a few times without letting out a sound. Then a sudden movement of his hands almost knocks over the figures on the chess board.

"He walked in," Rachel complains indignantly from behind him, "just like that!"

James finds his voice. "It's okay," he says to Rachel as he rises slowly, carefully. "I'll take care of it."

_Oh, will you?_ Pete leans casually against the doorframe - until Rachel's voice, trembling with righteous indignation, spoils the menace of his pose.

"You're in my way!"

He looks down at her; she's glowering up at him. "Oh, excuse me!" he says and moves aside.

She wheels herself back to the coffee table, peers at the board and says to James as though they had not been interrupted, "I did _not_ cheat. I moved my rock from there," she points, "to there."

"Rook," Pete corrects automatically. He moves into the room, flashes James a smile choc-a-block full of false cheer and proffers his hand. "Peter Barnes," he says. "A friend of Lisa's. Call me Pete. And you are?" He raises an enquiring eyebrow.

James looks at his hand - for a moment it looks as though he may refuse to shake it, but then he stretches out his own tentatively. His handshake is dry and surprisingly firm for someone who looks so - fragile and shaken. Then he says, "I think you know who I am." His voice is quiet, but steady, with a hint of granite under that soft smoothness, and he has just taken the impetus out of Pete's opening gambit by refusing to play his game.

Pete can't keep the appreciative twitch off his lips as he lets himself down on the couch next to James and stretches out his legs. "Dr Wilson, right? Is it okay if I call you Jim?"

"I prefer James," James says. After a moment's hesitation he adds, "Or Wilson."

Right, the kid calls him Wilson, which is something she must have picked up from Lisa. It would be a good idea to clarify that things will change from now on. "Too formal. Let's take James."

"I took your pawn!" Rachel crows. "It's your turn, Wilson."

Pete casts a glance at the chessboard. James should be able to win in four moves. Six, in the unlikely event of Rachel showing the slightest smidgen of tactical skill. But James, squinting at the board with furrowed brows, ignores the white queen that is begging to be slaughtered by his bishop, instead placing a knight where it is easy prey for Rachel's rook. His opponent, however, spurns this generous offer. She moves a pawn forward, thus exposing her king completely. Pete, whose teeth are on edge just from watching this ridiculous 'Who can lose fastest' competition, would have finished her off quick and clean, but James is hell-bent on staving off his inevitable victory for as long as possible. He moves his knight again, and as he puts it down, he flicks a casually pointing finger along the unobstructed diagonal between Rachel's queen and his hapless knight. Rachel follows his finger with her eyes.

"Oh," she says. She smashes the knight right off the board, knocking over James's queen in the process. "You didn't see that, did you, Wilson?"

"No," James lies, righting his queen, "but be careful or you'll knock over all the pieces."

"But that's how they do it in _Harry Potter_ , right, kid?" Pete interjects with an unholy grin. "They smash the pieces to smithereens."

"Yeah," she says, her glare slightly less inimical than before. Then she notes, "You're not talking funny today." She's right; he's doing without his British accent. So she isn't a complete moron.

"Today," he says with a side glance at James, "isn't 'funny talk' day."

"Rachel, would you like to get our guest a drink?" James asks.

"No! I'm playing with you. You want me to go so you can talk to him."

James sighs and prepares to sacrifice his queen.

"Quite the model dad, aren't you?" Pete mocks.

"He isn't my dad. I'm 'dopted."

"I do my best," James says quietly. "But I'm still learning."

"I don't _need_ a dad," the brat says haughtily, quoting something she must have heard from her mother. She makes another of her kamikaze moves that leaves James's queen unsullied while it exposes her own queen mercilessly.

James frowns and kneads his forehead with his fingers. "This," he says wryly, gesturing at the board, "is turning out to be more difficult than I had anticipated."

Rachel grins, exposing a gap in her top incisors. "I'm a good player, aren't I?"

Pete can't suppress a snort. James gives him a warning glance. To Rachel he says, "You're brilliant."

"You're doing just fine, too," Pete says expansively to James. It's time to launch an attack.

"Thanks," James says, leaning back to muster Pete. It seems that he isn't fooled at all by the bonhomie that Pete is exuding.

"Yeah. I mean, it's good to know that you two are bonding. That way, if anything happened to her mom, she'd still have someone." He has picked up the knight Rachel knocked down and is running it up and down his knuckles, like a coin. "Accident-prone family, aren't they. Cars crashing into their house, hurricanes caving in the roof, ..."

"Don't!" Wilson says sharply, glancing at Rachel.

She is gazing at Pete in awe. "You're not supposed to talk about _that_ ," she informs him in hushed tones. "Not even Nana is allowed to mention that in front of me! Mom will kill you," she predicts with relish.

"Only if you tell her," he counters. He's beginning to wonder whom James was trying to kill when he drove his car into that house - the mother or the daughter. "Are you a tattletale?"

Stalemate! She glares at him, and then she takes out her frustration on the chessboard: her queen does an elegant little hop that combines diagonal with horizontal movements and includes jumping over a pawn, to knock over James's king. "Gotcha!" she says.

"Hey," Pete objects, leaning forward and waggling a finger at the board. "You can't ..."

"Shut up!" James says. To Rachel he says, "Well done! I, uh, didn't see that coming."

Pete extracts his wallet and pulls out a dollar bill. "Here, go and get yourself an ice cream."

The dollar is plucked from his fingers, but not by Rachel. "How ...!" James interrupts whatever he was about to say and starts afresh. "You can't send her out by herself to get an ice cream."

"Why not? Because she's a cripple?" he asks, plonking his prosthetic onto the coffee table, where the impact not only knocks down the remaining chess figures, but also causes a hollow thunk.

"No. Because she's seven!" James turns to Rachel. "Rachel, if you go to your room now and leave me alone with, ah, Pete, I'll go out with you later to get an ice cream."

"Oh-kay." She turns to Pete. "What's with your leg?"

"Peg leg," he says nonchalantly. "Your mom likes damaged people." A hard stare at James.

"But I'll only take you if you disappear _now_ ," James says to Rachel.

She grimaces and skims the wheelchair backwards to give herself room to manoeuvre. "I don't think my mom likes _you_ ," she says to Pete. "You're not very polite."

"Oh, you'd be surprised," Pete replies, countering glare with glare. "Your mom likes me - a lot." He adds a suggestive wriggle of his eyebrow to the last sentence. And then he remembers James. Fuck! He had been determined to get through this confrontation without letting on that he was doing Lisa. That had probably been overly optimistic.

They are both silent until Rachel has wheeled herself out. Then James says carefully, "You're worried about more 'accidents'?" He doesn't sketch the quotation marks, but they hang in the air, nonetheless.

"Nope. It's all about controlling one's baser instincts, you know. Saying to oneself, _'I will not let that green-eyed monster take control_.' Reminding oneself that one does not own the other person and has no right to let out one's anger and frustration on him or her. In this case, on Lisa."

"That ... sounds great," James says, staring at him with a mixture of amazement and stupefaction.

"Because, you see, if anything should happen to Lisa, I'll ..." He pauses and tips his head. When he'd planned this he'd had a scene in mind that would have the gritty texture of a _film noire_. But now that he's sitting here in the light atmosphere of the apartment, threats of mayhem and murder at his hands seem displaced. So he utters the only threat that he's sure he can carry out. "I'll ensure that you'll never have another happy moment in your life."

James gapes. "Who, me?" He's not only great father material, he's also a talented actor; he's got this puzzled confusion thing down really well.

"Yes, you, you moron!" Pete snaps, suddenly in no mood for genteel sparring matches. "Lisa seems to believe that you didn't drive your car through her house in order to kill her. I have no idea what you told her as an explanation for what you did: that you were knocking down the wall so you could build an extension or that you lost control of the car or that you were trying to commit suicide." At that, James's features twitch suddenly. "Okay, so it was the suicide story. Nice: it explains the presence of your car in her front room even while it plays on her guilt and her caring instincts. Couldn't have thought of a neater tale myself. Thing is, _I_ don't buy it.

"So here's how this is going to work: from now on you'll start visiting other friends on your days out of the loony bin. If you haven't got any other friends, then _buy_ yourself some. And when you're released, you'll move far, far away. Put at least three time zones between Lisa and yourself."

James massages the back of his neck. "I don't think, um, Lisa is going to be enthused when she hears that you're managing her friendships for her. She tends to be stubborn about that kind of thing."

"Lisa loves you. If she didn't, she wouldn't be indulging in this suicidal crap." He waves a hand that encompasses James's presence in Lisa's living room. "But _I'm_ the one she's fucking now. You're history."

James looks surprised. "She is fu ..." He interrupts himself and lowers his voice. "She's sleeping with you? That's ... well!" He's stymied. And disapproving.

"Suck it up," Pete orders. Considering that he hadn't intended mentioning that he's intimate with Lisa, the satisfaction that rubbing it under James's nose is giving him should be tinged with a lot more unease and guilt. He was probably kidding himself when he'd resolved not to mention it - his subconscious must have been champing on the bit to blab it out. He gestures at the flat screen. "Think some chick flick where new boyfriend punches the living daylights out of abusive ex and rides off into the sunset with his gal."

James smiles faintly. "And here I was, thinking movie classics. _The Philadelphia Story_ springs to mind."

Pete can't suppress a chuckle, even though he's supposed to be taking this guy apart. "Oh, you!" He waggles a finger at him. "Seeing yourself as Dexter Haven!" Apropos of nothing he adds, "Two of Cary Grant's wives charged him with domestic violence."

"I've always seen myself more as a James Stewart kind of guy." James leans forward and starts picking up the chess figures. Pete helpfully takes his legs off the coffee table, so James can reach the ones on the ground.

"So, when do you have to be back in the loony bin tonight?" he inquires, all affability.

"I don't," James counters smoothly. "I get to stay overnight."

Pete is upright in a flash. "Oh, no, you don't."

"Relax, I'm sleeping in the spare bedroom. She's got three here."

He should have seen this coming: that James's stays outside the institution would slowly be extended in length. But he wasn't reckoning with this yet, and he's also unprepared for the violence of his reaction, for the panic that overcomes him. This will give the bastard the chance to pick up his former relationship with Lisa and sneak back into her confidence again before he, Pete, has the time to set something against it.

And what exactly is he going to set against James Wilson? A steady long-term relationship with Lisa to stop her from returning to James? He's off to New Orleans next weekend - so much for long-term commitments and riding off together into the sunset. He could, of course, set up base in Philly and return here after his forays into other states, instead of packing up entirely and looking for new work and new accommodation wherever he went. That way he could keep an eye on things - make sure that James got the message and put half a continent between himself and Lisa as soon as his release papers were signed.

But first of all, he needs to get the message across to James that he means business and that he'll protect Lisa's interests. If necessary, he'll play dirty. He rises, goes to the glass cabinet and gets two whisky glasses out. He opens a few random cabinet doors below it, but as expected, he finds no liquor.

"Didn't you offer me something to drink when I got here?" he asks.

"You'll have to make do with water or juice," James says. "Try the kitchen."

"I'm a boy scout at heart: _Be prepared_ is my motto." He returns to his spot on the couch and pulls his backpack towards him. Extracting a bottle of bourbon, he unscrews the cap, pours a generous amount into both glasses and pushes one of them over to James. The smile, he is happy to see, has faded from James's face. He moves a bit closer to James and swirls the liquor in his glass around. He takes a swig, and then he exhales into James's face. James is pale and his lips are tight.

"You - bastard!"

"Stress test - isn't that what they call it when patients are allowed out into their accustomed environment to see if they can cope? Can you cope, James, or should you opt for a longer, cosier stay in Mayfield, with visits to Lisa few, short and far between?"

The front door opens and slams shut again. Rapid steps approach. Lisa appears in the doorway, takes in the situation with one glance, and pounces. Gathering up the bottle and both glasses in one movement, she disappears into the kitchen. She reappears tight-lipped.

"I'd like to go back," James says in a low voice.

"Right," she says. She walks over to where he's still sitting, holds out a hand to pull him up, and when he's up she draws him into a quick, fierce hug. She lets him go again, and not even glancing at Pete, she asks, "Where's Rachel?"

"In her room," James tells her.

"Okay, go get your things. I'll take you back." She disappears.

Within a few seconds an altercation emits from the direction of Rachel's room. "I don't want to go to Louisa. It's boring there, and her cat smells."

"You are going there, Rachel. I'll be back in an hour."

"I don't want to. I always have to go there, and I hate it!"

"Rachel Cuddy, I haven't got the time for this. Take a book and your rabbit and go!"

Lisa reappears in the doorway of the living room. "And you, get out of here." They are the first and only words she addresses at him.

James is in the hall already, a small overnight suitcase standing next to him. Rachel streaks past in her wheelchair, a stuffed toy on her lap and a scowl on her face. Stopping in front of James, she complains, "You promised you'd get an ice cream for me."

"Next time," James says.

"It's not fair! I did as you told me to, and now I don't get my ice cream _and_ I have to go to stupid Louisa!"

"Rachel, lower your voice. Everyone, out!" Lisa commands. She ushers James out, making sure to keep him as far from Pete as possible. Rachel follows reluctantly, and Pete brings up the rear, pulling the door to behind him. Lisa and James get into the elevator.

When James is inside he looks straight at Pete. "Goodbye," he says and smiles a wan, melancholy smile. Then the elevator doors close. He's odd, Pete decides, decidedly odd.


	12. Riddles in the Dark II

Wilson leans back in the passenger seat of the car, allowing the gentle throb of the engine to soothe him while he replays the last hour or so in his mind. There's the shock of seeing House again, so changed and yet so unchanged: his face is smoother, now that the pain that etched such deep grooves in it has receded; the slight unevenness of his gait is practically unnoticeable and he's a lot less self-conscious now that he can't be singled out as a cripple at first sight; he laughs noticeably more, at things that in his last years in Princeton would at best have earned a lip twitch. But he's still the same jackass with little sense of moral or of decency. Good grief, mentioning the house collapse in front of Rachel! It's a good thing the kid is as unflappable as her mother.

"What happened?" Cuddy asks after giving him ten minutes to find his inner zen.

"You know P.G. Wodehouse? Those stories where some rich heiress's father wants to scalp Bertie Wooster and throttle him with his own innards because he suspects him of stealing a family heirloom and seducing his daughter, when in fact the heirloom was sold by the daughter to finance her elopement with her only true love, who also happens to be Bertie's best chum?" He's been doing a spot of light reading at Mayfield.

Unfortunately, Cuddy's exposure to one of the landmarks of comic literature is limited. "I have no idea what you're talking about. And this - isn't funny!"

He won't argue with that, so he drops the literary allusions and kindly summarises the afternoon. "My multi-tasking abilities were challenged at meeting an old acquaintance whom I wasn't expecting to see and whom I had to pretend not to recognise, carrying on a conversation about an incident which that person had caused, but couldn't remember, and which I was _supposed_ to have caused but can remember _not_ to have caused, and losing a game of chess against Rachel - all at the same time."

"I still have no idea what you're talking about."

_"Someone_ told House that I ran a car through your house, which brought his protective instincts to the fore. He was doing his version of a knight in shining armour rescuing the damsel in distress from the bad fire-breathing dragon when you interrupted us."

"No one told him _anything_. He did a little research of his own and came up with that outrageous conclusion. He thinks I'm some kind of abuse victim who keeps coming back for more." Cuddy does an eye-roll.

"That's just _so_ ridiculous!" he says. "As though you'd ever go back to him again after what he did! Oh, wait, you _have_ gone ..."

"Shut up, Wilson!" She pulls the car over to the side of the road, turns off the engine and leans back exhaustedly. "What the hell are we going to do?"

This is where Jeeves is supposed to materialise at his elbow, coughing discreetly, with a solution ready on a silver tray. But life's a bummer. "He suggested that I depart to some other part of the country."

"That - would be extreme!"

" _There can only be one_ ," he quotes. Cuddy looks blank; apparently, _Highlander_ is another cultural milestone that never lined the road along which she is travelling. "Never mind," he says. "Nolan suggested much the same, though for different reasons. Do you have a better suggestion?"

"We sit this out and wait for him to go back to Bristol?" Cuddy hazards.

"Fat chance of _that_ happening now that you've started something with him! Or was that just wishful thinking on his part?"

"No, but he isn't so clingy this time. But even if you moved away, letting him believe that you could potentially harm me is still ridiculously, insanely dangerous for you. He nearly caused a relapse! Why didn't you tell him it wasn't you who crashed that car?"

"Why didn't _you_?" he counters.

"I tried. He wouldn't believe me, and I let it slide since there seemed no pressing reason to exculpate you. But now he's stalking you!"

He rubs his face tiredly. "If we manage to convince him that it wasn't me driving that car, he's going to dig around till he finds out the truth." Cuddy shrugs in a 'can't be helped' manner. "Cuddy, I helped him to escape his past so he could be happy again - as far as it's in his nature to be happy. He was desperate; he was prepared to sacrifice what was dearest to him - do you know the movie _50 First Dates_ , where Drew Barrymore wakes up every morning with no memories of the previous day?" A chick flick, so she nods. "Yeah, well, no matter how much House and Foreman insisted that they had everything under control, something like that _could_ have happened. Chase refused to perform the surgery, saying that it was insane." He pinches the bridge of his nose. "If we tell him who he is and what he did, he'll be stuck with all the crap from his new life - no proof of formal education, blue-collar job, no money, no reputation - plus all the ballast from his old one. It would be a lose-lose."

"You're prepared to turn your life inside-out on the very slim odds that Pete ... House won't discover his own past at some point."

Wilson shrugs. "There isn't much left to turn inside-out. Besides, what about you? For years, you refused to forgive him for what he'd done to you and Rachel."

"Rachel wasn't his fault, and I never blamed him for that," Cuddy interjects. "I bled the construction company dry."

"Okay. But you're in a relationship with a man who, so you believe, tried to kill you four years ago. I may be playing the martyr for House, but by that self-same token _you're_ suicidal."

Cuddy is silent for a long time. Finally she says, "When you testified in court that he wasn't trying to kill _me_ , but himself ..."

"It was the truth, Cuddy!"

"I know! I believed you as soon as I'd had time to cool down - about a year later," she adds with a wry grin. "It made more sense, and it was exactly what House _would_ do. He's always been borderline suicidal, but he's never been a hypocrite."

"No?" Wilson can't help interjecting.

Cuddy raises her eyebrows in surprised disagreement.

Wilson expounds, "We're talking about the man who never forgave his girlfriend for overriding his medical wishes, although _he_ made an art form of ignoring patient wishes."

Cuddy considers this. Then she says, "Different battle field. I mean that he's not a hypocrite as far as social standards are concerned." She thinks a moment, biting her lip, before she comes up with, "I've been sexually harassed by a lot of guys, and most of them do it because it's a turn-on for them, a way of displaying power over women. House did it because it was a _game_ ; he knew I'd fight back and give as good as I got. And unlike other guys I've dated, he never thought he _owned_ me."

"That doesn't mean he couldn't be jealous." Wilson has no idea why he's playing the devil's advocate; perhaps it's because he'd rather not be considered responsible for advocating something that could well end in major incidents of mayhem.

"Jealous? Oh, hell, yes! I had fantasies of scratching out the eyes of every hooker he screwed after the break up, but I even managed a modicum of politeness towards his green card whore. I'm not denying that seeing me with another guy hurt him; I'm saying that his reaction wouldn't have been turned against _me_ but against _himself_. Which it was, I guess." Cuddy sighs. "But that didn't make it any better for me. In some ways it was even worse."

"You're saying ... that House trying to kill himself made you as angry as House trying to kill _you_?" And he'd thought that with House's departure from his life he'd be done with elliptical logic and weird associations.

"Yes. He chose the tree in front of my house," Cuddy says, as though this explains everything.

"Umm, that was kind of the point. Like marrying Dominika under your nose."

"Exactly! The rest of the world marries for love (or money); House does it solely to piss me off. Others commit suicide because they're miserable; House does it so that I'll feel remorse for the rest of my life. If I'd heard the crash, watched the EMT team peel his body out of the car and known that he'd died on my doorstep because of me, I'd have been racked with guilt till eternity."

"Cuddy, he short-circuited. If he'd stopped to think, I doubt he'd have tried to off himself at all, much less deliberately have chosen a tree just to mess with your head."

"I believe House is incapable of doing anything without trying to mess with other people's heads at the same time." After a pause she adds, "But whatever his motives may have been, I doubt he's any danger to me."

"Good!" Wilson exclaims with mock jollity. "And of course you don't expect him to change for you anymore. Or live up to whatever standards you set. Because although he may not endanger _you_ the next time you dump him, we'd _hate_ to have him wrap his car around one of the picturesque trees in Germantown, where it may cause you distress."

Cuddy's knuckles on the steering wheel whiten, but she only says quietly, "He has changed."

"Cuddy, it doesn't matter how much he has changed, because no one can live up to your unrealistic expectations!"

"That's not what I meant," she says, pained. "I meant that even if I dumped him, I doubt he'd care enough to have any sort of melt-down. At the moment he's wondering how to spring the news that _he's_ going to dump _me_."

* * *

The moment the elevator doors close, Rachel swings her wheelchair around towards the door of the apartment they've just left. Pete presses the 'down' button to bring the elevator back up again for him, and turns around to watch the child. She stops in front of the doormat and leans down, but she can't reach.

"Can you help me?" she asks him. "There's a key under the mat."

"You're supposed to go to your neighbour's place," he says dubiously.

"I don't want to. I've had to go there _two times_ this week already because Mom is so busy."

He has never as much as wondered what Lisa does with the squirt while she's with him. Now he knows. "I don't think your mom wants you to be alone."

"I can look after myself. She'll be back soon," Rachel argues.

He purses his lips, but then he bends down and retrieves the key. Opening the door he goes inside, leaving the door open for Rachel to follow.

"You can go," Rachel says. "I'm fine. I don't need you."

"You can choose: stay at home with me, or at Louisa's without me," he informs her.

"Oh, okay then," she says with offended dignity. "Can I watch television?"

"I suppose so," he says. "What do you want to watch?"

"Cartoons," Rachel says with such relish that he suspects she isn't normally allowed to watch them.

He doesn't particularly want more trouble with Lisa than he's headed for already, so he moves to the shelf next to the smallish flat screen where there's a selection of children's DVDs. That'll be stuff Lisa allows the kid to watch, and he'll persuade her to watch one of those. She'll probably have a few Disney cartoons.

"No, I mean those on TV!" Rachel whines. "Like Tom and Jerry."

There's one cartoon among the stack next to the flat screen that may meet her demands; it's a pirate cartoon that he vaguely remembers - he can remember the contents of a lot of movies and series, but not when or where he watched them. It's not really meant for children, but if Lisa keeps it here, she can't really disapprove. Besides, what does he care?

"No, not that one," Rachel says.

"It's a cartoon and it isn't sappy Disney stuff," he argues.

"No, but if Mom comes back when I'm watching it, she'll think I'm mad at her, and I'm not," Rachel explains, leaving him more confused than before.

He turns the cover over in his hands. "Why should she think you're mad at her?"

"Because that's the cartoon I watch when I am mad at her, coz it makes her upset."

There's some sort of subtext there, but one probably has to be a Cuddy to understand it. "Well, it looks like the only DVD here that won't bleach my brain, so in it goes." He flops down on the couch. Rachel parks her wheelchair at the other end. "You want out?" he asks, gesturing at the other end of the couch. She shakes her head, probably more from a desire to avoid closer contact with him than to eschew the comforts of the couch. Her loss.

He's soon immersed in the cartoon, which isn't half bad, though he can see why Lisa objects to it. It has no educational value whatsoever (unless one counts pirate jargon as educational), and some of the situational humour can, at a stretch, be considered adult. What he can't see is why Lisa doesn't confiscate the DVD if she doesn't approve of it. Why allow a seven year old to manipulate her with it?

Rachel is soon forgetful enough of his presence to laugh heartily and even to speak the characters' lines along with them. But after half an hour she gets fidgety. Then she says, "I'm hungry."

"You wanna eat in front of the TV?"

"No, I don't want to watch anymore." She's clearly worried she'll be caught watching the pirate cartoon.

He sighs. "Let's see what we can hustle up for you," he says, rising stiffly. She wheels her chair into the kitchen behind him.

"Have you really got a peg leg?" she asks as he roots around in the fridge.

"Yep," he says to the butter.

"Can I see it?" Pause. "Please?"

He turns and regards her with pursed lips, but then he tugs up his jeans to display the bottom of his prosthetic.

Rachel does not appreciate this unique gesture as the selfless act of soul-baring that it is. "Aw, no, that's not a peg leg! _Everyone's_ got those."

"Everyone?" He's not exactly proud of his prosthetic - far the opposite, in fact - but he has always assumed that he belongs to a small, unfortunate minority.

"Everyone in the rehab I went to who'd had an ... an ampertation," she elucidates. " _No one_ had a wooden one like the pirate."

Well, it's too bad that he can't satisfy her peculiar brand of voyeurism.

There's absolutely nothing in that fridge that can be chucked into the microwave and heated, so he figures he'll have to order takeaway. As he straightens and closes the fridge Rachel says yearningly, "Wilson was going to make meat balls."

Good for Jimmy. That explains the ground beef in the fridge. Unfortunately for Rachel, he isn't a doormat like James. He scans the flyers on the pin board for a pizza delivery service.

"He made them last time," Rachel continues. "They're the best ever. He promised to make them again today." Pause. "Is he coming back today?"

"I doubt it." No pizza delivery service. No delivery service whatsoever, to be exact.

"Oh."

At least she isn't throwing a tantrum. He eyes her, wondering whether the idea of pizza will appeal to her. Then again, what child doesn't like pizza? Lisa will probably freak; if she approved of takeaway, there'd be flyers and the like.

But then another thought strikes him: maybe part of James's toxic appeal is his ability to play Domestic God, as in: keeping Rachel entertained, cooking for all of them, and probably even doing the dishes afterwards. He can picture James in an apron wiping down the kitchen surfaces and stacking the dirty dishes in the dishwasher according to some anal system, and it's understandable that such qualities would appeal to a working single mom. If he, Pete, really wanted to do Lisa a favour, he'd do well to show her that James is nowhere as unique as she seems to believe, rather than try to scare him away (which, in hindsight, was probably a stupid move calculated to bring Lisa's protective instincts to the fore).

Besides, he's certain that he can beat James's mad meatball skillz hands down.

Meatballs will take a while, so he cuts some carrots, cucumber and celery into sticks, whips up an avocado-and-soured-cream dip and plonks that in front of Rachel to keep her busy until he has converted the ground beef into meat balls in tomato sauce.

"You're quick," Rachel remarks as he chops up an onion. She's slowly beginning to thaw. The way to a woman's heart is through her stomach.

He nods to acknowledge the compliment. "You must be mad at your mother pretty often, the way you know every word of that pirate cartoon."

"Naaah. I've had it a loooong time, that's why I know it so well. Since I was _this_ small." She holds her hand about one foot over the ground.

"Why does your mother let you have it if she doesn't like you watching it?"

"Because it's mine, not hers. I got it from House, and House was a bad egg. A Bad Egg with a Gimp Leg," she chants.

He eyes her, perplexed, his mind racing back to Lisa waking up in Bristol, saying something about a house. Not _a_ house, but _House_. A name. Whose name?

"Bad egg? That's what your mom calls him?"

"No, that's what Nana says. Mom doesn't talk about him. Nana says he's a _meshugener,_ a _shtik drek_." She lets the words roll off her tongue with aplomb as she dips a finger into the avocado mush and licks it.

Okay, if Lisa won't talk about him and Lisa's mom hates him, then he's an ex-boyfriend. If Rachel can remember him, he must have been James's successor, the one James went ballistic over, turning his car into a cruise missile. That woman has a curious taste in men: James the Abusive Alcoholic; House the Bad Egg; and he himself isn't exactly God's Gift to Womankind either. ... Wait: gimp leg?

"What about his leg? He had a peg leg?"

"I don't remember, really. It was long ago. We took him to hospital once in the middle of the night. There was blood from his leg everywhere, so he must have had a _really_ bad leg - _my_ legs don't bleed at all. He had a stick to walk with," she recalls.

That explains Lisa's initial attraction to him, Pete. His uneven gait must have reminded her of Gimp-Legged Bad-Egg.

"What happened to him?"

"Dunno. I guess he left. Nana says no one can put up with mom, but _I_ think it had something to do with the crash, because no one will talk about that either. Except for Nana, when she thinks I'm not listening. Maybe he's dead," Rachel concludes casually. "There was a LOT of blood."

His meat balls are burning, and he isn't surprised Bad Egg took off after the crash. That sort of thing - being given the Evil Eye by one's girlfriend's ex, who then proceeds to reinforce the message with a ton of steel at 40 mph - can kill a blighter's romantic urges.

It's when he's rescuing the meat balls with a dose of vinegar that he becomes aware of the Evil Eye on himself. He turns to find Lisa in the kitchen doorway, any number of emotions chasing over her face, and none of them boding well for him.

"Who is dead?" she asks Rachel gently, but Rachel isn't fooled. She draws a pattern on the table with a finger, one that is, unfortunately, covered in dip. "Rachel?" Lisa prods.

"House," Rachel mumbles.

Lisa draws up a kitchen chair and sits down next to Rachel. "Rachel," she says. Then she sees what Rachel has done to the kitchen table. She plucks Rachel's hand off the table, swivels round and says to him, "Here, give me something to wipe this up with."

He throws her a cloth from the sink with which she wipes Rachel's hand and the table before throwing it back at him. It hits him squarely in the chest. Someone is not happy with him.

"Rachel, House isn't dead. He's alive and ... living a happy life somewhere. He moved away. And the blood you remember, ..." She pauses, caught up in some memory. "The blood was when he tried to fix his leg himself. We took him to hospital, they ... stopped the bleeding, and then he was fine."

Rachel eyes her doubtfully. Lisa sees it and gives a little laugh. "He was hopping around again within three days, and he got his stitches taken out two weeks later. That's a lot less time than _you_ had to spend in hospital when you got hurt, isn't it? Ask Wilson if you don't believe me."

"Is Wilson allowed to talk about House?" Rachel asks.

Lisa looks as though she's bitten into a lemon. "Everyone is allowed to talk about House. Well, everyone except for Nana," she amends. Rachel grins at that. "I - I didn't think you remembered him."

"You talk about other things I don't remember."

"Only if I _like_ remembering them," Lisa says.

That guy must have been a Very Bad Egg indeed, if Lisa, who has let Abusive Wilson into her house and into her life again, prefers not to remember him.

The meal is as amicable as is possible given the giant elephant that's perched on the kitchen counter, and then Lisa brings Rachel to bed. He toys with the idea of tidying up the kitchen to earn some brownie points, but while he quite enjoys cooking, he's less enthusiastic about clearing the debris afterwards; and as for warding off Lisa's death rays, cleaning up the kitchen will shield him about as much as a paper bag over one's head will repel nuclear radiation - helpful against alpha radiation, but of no use whatsoever against beta and gamma rays. So he rescues a carton of orange juice from the confines of the fridge, props his feet up on the kitchen table and awaits the inevitable.

When Lisa returns to the kitchen, she says, "Thanks for cooking."

"S'okay."

"Why didn't she go to Louisa's?"

Good question. He should have made her go there and then run for the hills. Then he would have avoided the pitfall named 'House' and by the time Lisa caught up with him, she'd have calmed down. Not that she appears particularly upset at the moment. She's already busy clearing the dishes into the sink and wiping down kitchen surfaces, instead of sharpening knives whilst looking for particularly vulnerable spots on his torso.

When she has restored some semblance of order she leans back against the kitchen counter looking down at him with a basilisk stare. (Stupid position to get into, he tells himself.) "Here's how this will go: you do not, _ever_ , tap my daughter for information. Do you understand?"

He nods. There's no sense in debating this point, since by the time she's done with him he probably won't be in a position to wring the slightest bit of informational dew out of Rachel even if she should be dripping with it. She wasn't all that informative, anyway. He learned more in the two minutes Lisa talked to her than in the two hours that preceded them.

"Oh, and you don't talk to my mother either. Do you get that?" He gapes at her - how did she guess that he was considering that move? She pokes a finger into his chest. "My mother is a sadistic monster who takes great pleasure in rubbing my failures into my face. I don't want her in my private life. If you phone her, email her, friend her on Facebook or, God forbid, turn up on her doorstep, I _will_ find out. And trust me, afterwards you'll be wishing that you'd gotten involved with a shark. Do. You. Get. That?"

"Got that," he says, his mind absolutely frothing at all the subtext that needs to be deciphered. There's no way he can keep away from her mother, not after this performance, but it'll take him a while to figure out how to do that without incurring wrath from heaven.

"Okay," she says. "Cup of coffee?"

That's it? That is _all_? "If I say yes, will you lace it with arsenic?"

"No, strychnine," she parries. "I'm not happy that you're here, that you sneaked your way in by faking an emergency - ever heard of the boy who cried wolf? - or that you tried to start some sort of territorial dispute with Wilson, who, by the way, hasn't done a thing to deserve being subjected to your particular brand of alpha male pissing contest. But I can sort of see where you're coming from. You think your 'intervention'," she sketches quotation marks, "may keep Wilson from becoming abusive again." She leans over to give him a quick peck. "It's very sweet of you, but entirely unnecessary. I can look after myself, and Wilson, contrary to what you believe, is not abusive."

"And I'm imagining your PTSD."

"What happened to me - the car crashing into my house, the house collapsing on Rachel in my presence during Hurricane Irene - is enough to warrant PTSD without any sort of abuse." She brushes the hair out of her face with one hand. "That car crash was a suicide attempt, not attempted murder or manslaughter."

"And it was pure coincidence that he chose _your_ house with _you_ in it to off himself."

"He chose the tree in front of my house, not the house." She pushes his cup towards him and sits down opposite him.

"Then he must have been really, _really_ drunk. Or a really bad driver."

Lisa leans her forehead on both hands. "There was someone in front of that tree, so he swerved at the last moment. The car hit the curb and then went through my wall."

"How unfortunate! And you saw all this with your magic swivelling eye through the walls of your house, and mind-read his intentions."

Lisa raises her head and her voice. "I've known him for _years_. He'd never been abusive till then, or violent. And the witness outside testified in court."

"Someone James knew?" She's silent. "A friend, huh?" She flushes. "Don't see him any more without some form of protection."

"Sorry?"

"You heard me. Don't go near James unless you have someone with you who can call the police and fend him off for a while. And don't let him stay here."

"Are _you_ telling me what to do?"

"I'm telling you what needs to be done so you don't end in the morgue. Tell me when you want to visit him, and I'll accompany you. But don't go by yourself, don't bring him here, don't ..."

"You think because we've got something going that you can order me around? You're jealous of Wilson."

"No!" This is not going well at all. "This has nothing to do with ..."

"I'm not discussing this!" She pushes her chair back in an uncontrolled movement that nearly tips it over and rises, backing away towards the kitchen counter. "I don't care what you want me to do or why. You can call it what you like - you're behaving like the jealous abuser that you make Wilson out to be."

He has really put his foot in it. He doesn't mean to sound controlling; he just finds what he demands so logical, so grounded in common sense, that he doesn't see what need there is to clothe it in terms that are acceptable to her in her present state of mind. '"I ..."

"No!"

Only now does he realise that her hands are trembling uncontrollably. Shit, he's done it again! She's on the verge of an anxiety attack.

He glances around the kitchen for inspiration, but finds none, so he slowly gets to his feet and limps to the hall where he left his backpack. He picks it up. She has followed him as far as the kitchen door and is now standing at a safe distance in the doorframe watching him.

He turns to her when he reaches the front door. "Let me know if you change your mind about discussing how to avoid getting killed by James."

"And if I don't change my mind?" He is silent. "Are you threatening to break up because I won't stop helping an old friend?"

He closes his eyes to stop her from seeing into them. "No. This isn't about your helping an old friend. This isn't even about my jealousy, because I'm not jealous."

"Right" she says, the word loaded with disbelief.

Fine - if it'll break her resistance he'll admit to jealousy. "Okay, so I'm jealous, too. But that's not the issue. What I want ... am asking of you is logical. It makes sense. What _you're_ doing, doesn't. It's suicidal. If you won't be reasonable about this, ..."

"Reasonable!" She laughs slightly hysterically.

"...and won't even discuss it with me, then I guess James still means too much to you. And if that's the case, I'd rather not stay around and get hurt."

He lets himself out and closes the door behind him.


	13. Over Hill and Under Hill

He still doesn't have enough money for a longer trip, but he's getting antsy, so he decides to take a short break and head south. He doesn't have any illusions as to why he's starting with New Orleans instead of the North: he's always wanted to go there (okay, 'always' for the past three years) because of the music. But if he's interested now, chances are that he was interested already at the age of twenty-two, and somehow he can see himself choosing a medical school based not on its merits, but on its surroundings. He has a really good time, but finds no evidence at Tulane that he ever attended the university there. He also can't find his way around the campus or around New Orleans, but that doesn't mean anything, he supposes. He ends up staying longer than planned, and hanging around jazz bars cuts deeper into his budget than he'd anticipated, so after a week he heads straight back to Philly instead of dropping in at Johns Hopkins in Maryland, as he'd originally intended.

His former employer is happy to have him back, because he's cheap, fast, and good, so he works long shifts to get together more money as quickly as possible. In between, he tries different strategies to find out more about himself. He drives out to Acme, takes a liberal dose of anti-anxiety meds that he tops off with two cans of beer, waits until he feels nicely spaced out, and then he does a round of 'shopping': he walks around the store not really looking at the individual items, just tossing stuff into his cart. At the end he examines the contents. At first glance there's nothing surprising there: a packet of ground meat, chilli beans, a few apples, bananas, frosted flakes, Aunt Jemima maple syrup, eggs, flour, bacon, rice, toast, butter, Suave shampoo, toilet paper, a tube of Colgate. Orange juice, two six-packs of Yuengling and a bottle of Maker's Mark. Cheez Doodles, microwave popcorn and cookie dough flavoured ice cream; all of them items he wouldn't hesitate buying today. But there's also an all-bran cereal in there, a loaf of wholegrain bread and low-fat plain yogurt. All three are definitely foods he'd eschew unless there was nothing else on offer. Orange juice isn't his drink of choice either, nor would he normally buy quite as many apples as are in his cart unless he was intending to bake apple pies. And how often does he crave popcorn?

Who the hell was he living with?

As the days pass, he gets edgy. Wilson must have spent the last weekend at Lisa's place, unless he was impressed by his, Pete's, threats, which he doubts. The next weekend finds him restless. He works for twelve hours each day under conditions that make him long wistfully for the Brunel, and when he's off the clock, he keeps himself busy, but it's all he can do not to take the car and park himself within sight of Lisa's house. But that would be pathetic and stupid, and doubtless she's right and nothing will happen. If it does, it'll be months or years from now, and he can't possibly keep an eye on her for that long. He's certainly not going to make a fool of himself hanging around outside her place and being apprehended by the police for potentially criminal activities in an upper class neighbourhood.

By Monday his method of keeping himself distracted makes a visit to some sort of medical centre advisable. He knows a walk-in clinic close to City Center, having passed it several times. The clinic happens to be part of the department of 'Family and Community Medicine' of Lisa's hospital, and she just happens to be in the clinic every Monday and Thursday, as a few phone calls during the last week informed him, but that's hardly a reason _not_ to go there, so he gets out his sunglasses and a baseball cap and limps in through the glass sliding doors.

Inside, there's a large waiting area with orange plastic seats, a few low tables sporting magazines, and two water dispensers. Examination rooms branch off to the right and the left; a reception desk is situated straight ahead with three receptionists sitting behind it, separated from their clientele by a large glass pane. To the left of the reception desk lies a glass-fronted office, and there he spots Lisa. She's standing in front of her desk, bending over a file that a nurse is showing her. He can't see all of her face, but what he can see doesn't look battered or bruised. Her whole stance, while attentive, seems relaxed.

He goes over to reception and states his case. It's a free clinic that guarantees anonymity, but the receptionist still wants to know a lot more about him than he's willing to impart, so matters get a little tense for a while. It takes all his persuasive powers, which the receptionist brands as 'appalling rudeness and insulting behaviour, culminating in verbal assault', to get onto the waiting list. After a twenty-minute wait on the orange plastic seats next to a boy who is scratching his armpits and an old man whose lungs make interesting whooshing sounds he is left to kick his heels in an examination room, where he whiles away the time with a game of darts using disposable syringes as darts - the things they leave lying around in these examination rooms! - and inflated surgical gloves as targets.

The physician comes just in time to curtail his next activity: making aeroplane models with tongue depressors and tape. An older guy with a harassed look and greying hair, he takes a look at his sore stump, another at the prosthetic, and proceeds to fill out a prescription.

"What, no questions on how this came about?" Pete asks.

"Mr Reagan, you say you're a cowboy and that this happened while riding, so you came all the way from, umm, Texas to our clinic to get it treated. I'll just believe you, shall I?" the man says, not looking up.

"Patients always lie."

At that moment the door is flung open and Lisa walks in.

"Ah," Pete says. Caught in the act.

The physician looks up in surprise. At Lisa's questioning look he gestures at Pete's exposed stump and says, "Amputation. Abrasions, soreness, and swelling, probably due to over-exertion. The prosthetic doesn't fit very well, but if he keeps off his legs for a few days ..."

"I've got this," Lisa says to him.

The physician looks at her as she leans against the wall, her arms crossed, at Pete, who does his Mask of Innocence expression, and at the file in his hands. "Okay," he says. "Sure you don't want me to stay? He seems a challenging character."

Lisa shakes her head and waits until he's out the door. Pete takes off his sunglasses and the baseball cap resignedly.

"How'd you find out I'm here?" he asks.

"If you want to stay anonymous, don't start arguments with my receptionists."

"Oh, come on, you must be getting this sort of thing twenty times a day."

"I told them to inform me when a white male, mid-fifties, with a limp comes here. I narrowed it down to _asshat_ white male after one day. Let me see!"

She looks at the stump, gently prods the swelling and examines the abrasions. Then she examines the prosthetic. "What the hell have you been doing?"

"What makes a guy's stump sore?" he asks suggestively.

"You don't do enough of that to ... " Her voice peters out as a thought strikes her. She narrows her eyes at him. "You've been running, you moron!" she says. "How far did you run?"

"I'm doing something for my health. Lots of people run - _you_ run." He'd seen her running shoes in the hallway when he was at her place.

"Not with one of these." She waves the prosthetic.

"Ever heard of the Paralympics?"

"Please, please tell me that you didn't run twenty miles with this prosthetic!"

He musters his remaining foot in its trainer. "No, just three," he mutters. Even that was difficult; he'd done a lot of brisk walking, but running - getting both legs off the ground when only one is a real one - is quite a challenge. It had been more of a skip than a run, but that's beside the point, he guesses.

"Great! You're fifty-five years old ..."

"Fifty-three," he corrects. That's what his passport says.

She pauses. "Fine, fifty- _three_. You haven't done any sort of physical activity in years, you have a mediocre prosthetic, and one fine Sunday you get up and say, let's go for a run."

"Saturday," he corrects again. " _And_ Sunday." He'd been determined to get the technique right, so he'd had to try again, hadn't he?

"You ran three miles on Saturday, and then, because the pain wasn't enough, you ran three more on Sunday," she summarises. "Did you ever run before that with your prosthetic?" He's silent. "Okay." She walks over to the phone on the wall and dials a number. "Walter? Dr Cuddy speaking. I'm sending you a patient who needs a new AK. An Ossur flex-blade and a decent knee joint for running. ... Yes, I know what that costs. ... Yes, I'll take care of it ... Bump him up on the list, he needs it fast. Oh, and if you could replace the socket on his present one? ... Okay, he'll be with you in about half an hour."

She puts down the phone, takes out a pad and a pen and writes something down. "Here, go there and tell them I sent you. They'll fix this prosthesis for you and get you another one for running. Have you got pain killers?" When he nods, she jots down a few lines in his patient file and snaps it shut. "The next time you want to find out whether I'm okay, don't go crippling yourself as an excuse for turning up. Just drop in, okay?"

"I ... won't be dropping in anymore," he says slowly. "I'm leaving Philly as soon as ..." He gestures at the prosthetic.

"Oh." Her face drops; she studies the cover of his file with sudden interest.

"Have you thought about what I said regarding James?" he asks, hoping against hope, although she's not the type to back down.

She takes a step forward and looks him straight in the eye. "I'm not dropping him to satisfy your paranoia."

He gives a short nod. "Then I guess ... this is farewell."

"Don't ...," she says before breaking off. She bites her lip, but then she mirrors his nod. Stepping up to him she places a hand on his cheek. "Goodbye, Pete," she says softly. Then she drops her hand and turns towards the door. In the doorway she turns around again. "Look, I know this is presumptuous, but will you stay in touch? Just as a friend," she says hurriedly when his eyebrows quirk.

"We've never been friends," he states bluntly.

Her eyebrows rise. "We did pretty good in Bristol," she points out.

"Even then, I didn't see you as a 'friend'." It doesn't come out quite as suggestively as he would like, because truth be told, he's sorer about ending this than he'd anticipated.

"How many people do you see as friends?" she asks knowingly.

He considers this. Baz and Ellie, maybe? He hasn't bothered to let them know how he's doing since he got to Philadelphia. In fact, unless Ellie has told the others, they don't even know where he is. And if they had suddenly disappeared from his life, the way he has from theirs, he wouldn't feel any compulsion to figure out where they had gone.

Lisa's voice cuts into his ruminations. "Right. So, since friendship is a comparatively unknown concept to you, why don't we give it a try? Learning by doing. You let me know every now and then whether you're okay. That's all."

"You sure you aren't confusing midlife maternal surges with this friendship thingy?"

"Call it what you like, but call me!"

"Geez, mom! Oh, okay," he concedes, secretly pleased that she should be bothered about his well-being. Nodding, she turns briskly on her heels again and is out of the room before he can say any more. He suspects that her sudden speed is motivated by a desire to avoid any further confrontation that can lead to his retracting his offer.

He fixes up his prosthetic again, pulls his jeans on and ties up his trainers. When he comes back into the waiting area, the scratching boy is wheezing and looking anxious. He walks over to the reception desk. "You've got a problem over there," he says.

The receptionist doesn't look up. "We've got fifty problems," she says dismissively.

He musters her for a moment, and then he walks over to the glass front of Lisa's office and knocks on it.

"Hey, don't do that!" the receptionist yells even as Lisa looks up. He points to the boy, Her gaze shifts to where he is pointing and she comes striding to her office door.

"You might want to get someone to look at him," he says.

She looks from him to the boy, and then she runs over to the boy, putting a finger to his neck to feel his pulse. After a moment she looks back at him questioningly.

"Anaphylactic shock," he says, slinging his backpack over his shoulder. He shouts over to one of the nurses, "Need 0.1 cc epinephrine here!"

Lisa is making the boy lie down and elevating his feet. He guesses he's done his job here, so he heads for the door.

"Thank you," Lisa calls after him. And then, "Call me next week."

* * *

He's still in Philadelphia the next weekend, and around three o'clock on Sunday afternoon he loses his cool and phones her.

"Just wanted to say thanks for the prosthetic," he says awkwardly.

"Have you got it already?"

"No. I'm getting it fitted next week."

She's silent.

Finally he says, "And I thought I'd tell you that I'm leaving after that."

"Crap. You're calling to check on me because you know Wilson is here." He can hear a man's voice in the background. Then Lisa holds the receiver away from her mouth and says into the room, "It's ... Pete. He's going to leave Philly and travel around." Her hesitation is interesting. He could swear that she was going to say some other name first; in short, that she was about to lie to James about who is on the phone.

James says something. Then, suddenly, it's James's voice on the phone. "Pete. Cuddy is fine and I'm not going for her throat today - it isn't full moon."

He grins at the Harry Potter allusion. "That kid is rotting your brain," he says.

"The alcohol took care of that," James says without much regret. "But feel free to check on her regularly. It would ease my mind."

That doesn't make sense - the last time they talked he'd threatened this guy with serious psychological warfare. Or maybe it does. "So basically you want me to play guard dog for you – to make sure, by keeping an eye on Lisa, that you don't step out of line. Do I get paid for this?"

James sighs audibly. "No. Cuddy ... Lisa worries enough as it is, mostly about me. It'll make it easier for her if she doesn't worry about you, too. And that in turn makes it easier for me." Then, conversationally, he says, "You're getting a new prosthetic?"

"Yeah, a flex blade."

"Great. And - where are you headed?"

Small talk has never been his strength, and having a casual conversation with his ex's volatile ex definitely fits the category 'weird AU experiences'. "The north first, New York and Boston, then to the south. From there I'll head west."

"Sounds good. ... Looking for anything special?"

"No, not really. Just sightseeing - the usual."

"Oh, haven't you ever been here before? Your accent had me fooled." There's a hint of ... disbelief in James's voice that he can't quite place. The man doesn't trust him, and he's getting an odd vibe there. He's being touched for information.

"I used to live here when I was a kid, but I don't remember much, so I thought I'd go and look at it all again." That's the story he's cooked up to explain his accent, which decided to turn unmistakeably and irrevocably American within days of his arrival.

"Okay ... well." James, at the other end, seems uncertain how to end this conversation. "Just phone Cuddy every now and then, will you?"

"Right," he says, and puts down the phone. James Wilson is an odd fellow, not least because he calls his former girlfriend by her last name. One would think that a ladies' man like that - three divorces to his name - would have switched to 'Lisa' once their working relationship turned into something more intimate.

Next Sunday he phones her again.

"Hey."

"Pete! Do you know what time it is?"

"It's nine p.m. in California."

"Are you in California?"

"No - but I could be."

"Where are you?"

"New York."

"Everything okay?"

"Peachy."

"You got enough money?"

"Are you my mom?"

"Okay. Goodnight, Pete."

"G'night."

The next week he promptly forgets. He's busy trying out the new prosthetic and enjoying the heightened comfort that a snugly fitting socket on his old one gives him, so it's Tuesday evening before he phones, and then only after she texted him a few times with increasing desperation.

"Are you stalking me?" he begins without a preamble.

Silence. Then, "I was worried, okay?"

"That someone will run me down with his car? I was hoping that _you_ were keeping an eye on Jimmy."

"You're an ass, you know."

"I was busy," he whines. "I still am - got two hot bods in my bed right now. Girls, say hello to Lisa." In a high falsetto voice he says, "Hello, Lisa, I'm Shanice." He switches the phone to the other side and says in an even higher tone, "Hi, Lisa, I'm Janice. Pete is _such_ a stud!"

Lisa chuckles. "Seriously, what are you up to?"

"Sightseeing. New York's a big place." It certainly is, and it has a lot of teaching hospitals that need to be checked out.

"Okay." She sounds as though she doesn't quite believe him. "Try not to forget to call next week."

"No, mom. ... If you're that worried, why don't _you_ call _me_?"

"Huh, that would be stalking, wouldn't it, if the ex whom you dumped kept phoning you?"

"But it's okay for me to phone you," he ruminates.

"We-ell, _you_ broke up with _me,_ so that wouldn't be stalking, not unless I was dating again. It would be 'raising false hopes' at the worst, but I _asked_ for you to phone me, so I think it's okay."

"I must have skipped the class in high school where they taught the Fifty Rules of Dating."

"It isn't _dating_ that you have no clue of, it's the concept of breaking up that seems to elude you."

"I have problems with these so-called social interactions, so my shrink told me to imitate what I see other people doing. Like, when you told me in Bristol that you didn't want a relationship with me, but kept turning up in my life." He pauses to let that sink in. If someone's breathing can sound dangerous, then it's Lisa's. He decides to give her a break. "Let's simplify this: you call me when you want to; I call you when I want to."

"Fine!" she snaps. "Goodnight, Pete."

"G'night, Lisa."

They talk irregularly from then on. Mostly Lisa phones; the calls are short. There is, after all, not that much to say. But it's reassuring to know that someone will miss him and go looking for him if he ends up as road kill on one of his runs. And it's a nice way to end the day: to exchange a few uncomplicated words, trade a few insults, banter a bit.

The difficulty lies in not letting slip what he's up to. He's sure she could be helpful in his search in more ways than one: she works in a teaching hospital, used to be dean of another teaching hospital, and probably has contacts all over the country. He'd like to bounce a few ideas off her, because his search is proving exceedingly difficult. For one thing he has no idea when he was born, which means that he has to go back any number of years in his search of the archives. And since he has nothing to go on except his present appearance, finding himself in old photos will probably be a matter of chance. Another obstacle that is proving hard to surmount is the bureaucratic red tape involved in getting into the archives. Normally this wouldn't bother him; he'd just slip under any metaphorical road block placed in his way and bluff his way through, but he's keenly aware of the inadvisability of getting caught in a situation that might end with his fingerprints being taken and compared to police records.

Parallel to his searches in university archives he's been browsing through standard medical fare in bookshops and faculty libraries in the hope of pinning down his speciality and then rooting around in conference proceedings and medical publications to see if his picture turns up anywhere, but that has proved to be even more of a dead end. There are few areas that he doesn't seem to have at his command, no field in which he can't answer standard questions; he could be a specialist in at least five areas: neurology, nephrology, oncology, infectious disease and paediatrics. Apparently he's also pretty much an expert on rare genetic conditions.

The more he thinks about it, the more convinced he grows that Lisa (and James) would probably be able to help him clarify his identity within a month, but he is reluctant to confide in them. Depressingly boring and unimpressive as his present _persona_ as a crippled cook may be, the aura that surrounds 'genius doc' loses a lot of its shine when one adds to it a criminal past and an opiate addiction. James would have an absolute field day with that: what's a bit of house demolition under the influence of alcohol when compared to a career with a drug syndicate that probably culminated in some sort of capital crime? And Lisa has got a kid; she won't want a former mobster near her.

No, he's better off posing as a cook. From what Lisa lets slip one day, she's got a low taste in men anyway: when he phones her at 5 a.m. in the morning (he can't sleep and is bored), she informs him sleepily that he reminds her of an ex who was a PI and who used to come home in the early hours after stake-outs expecting to have sex.

"Did you oblige?"

"God, yes! I was convinced that he was all that stood between me and a lonely old age, so I put up with a lot of bullshit from him. Never again!"

"So you got yourself a kid instead. Congratulations!"

"That was _after_ I got Rachel."

"So was that telephone sex you were offering just now?"

"What would that get me?"

"The satisfaction of knowing that _I'm_ getting some satisfaction?"

"I'm fine knowing that your balls are turning blue."

"Why did your PI get real sex in the wee hours while I don't even get a few kind words?"

"Because you aren't my boyfriend."

"Ever heard of post-break-up sex?"

She sighs and asks, apparently randomly, "Are you coming back here some time?"

"Are you going to stop seeing Wilson?" he counters.

"I'm not seeing Wilson _that_ way," she says obscurely.

He's not going to discuss the different ways of _not_ dating a guy. "You're seeing him as in, 'strengthening his obsession with you and granting him opportunities to harm you'."

There is a very long silence at the other end. Then, "Why don't you talk to Wilson about this and see what he has to say? You'll _like_ him."

"My liking him won't solve the basic problem."

"Which is that you're jealous!"

"I'm not dating you; I have no reason to be jealous."

"According to that logic, Wilson is no danger to me, since he isn't dating me either."

He has to concede the point.

After a few moments she says, "If this isn't about jealousy, but about my safety, then feel free to hang around when he's here. But I don't want you hovering over him and threatening him."

"Are you giving in on this?" he asks unbelievingly.

"It's called a compromise," she snaps.

"Okay, define 'hovering' and 'threatening'," he demands.

"Just behave the way you would if he wasn't around."

"You don't want that," he says suggestively.

"Oh, for heaven's sake!"

He can hear that she's on the verge of ending the call. He's going to have to take a little step in her direction. "Are PDAs in his presence allowed? Or must I refrain for fear of setting him off?"

"I've told you that if I thought there was _anything_ that would set him off, I wouldn't be seeing him," she says with waning patience.

"So they're allowed."

"Depends."

"On what?"

"On whether we're, you know, together again?"

"If I say we are, do I get telephone sex?"

"Then you can have the _real_ stuff at the weekend."

* * *

She comes up to Boston for the weekend as promised. He's relieved on some level, though he still isn't quite sure what he's getting into here. Just to be on the safe side, he opts to meet her on neutral ground first, because if he brings her straight to his motel he knows how this will go: they'll end up in bed without having discussed how things will continue regarding James Wilson, and then over breakfast there'll be a nasty little scene because she'll believe that getting his rocks off after a period of dearth will mellow him enough that he won't pursue the matter, while he'll just insist on his standpoint, eight a.m. not really being his time of day for diplomacy. So, after picking her up from the airport he takes her to a bar, finds a quiet spot in a corner and gets them two beers. If this ends with her walking out on him, he'd rather not be sitting somewhere where every customer has a front row seat to their performance.

But to his surprise she pre-empts him. "I don't think this Wilson thing is going to be a problem," she says. "He's due to be released in ten days, and he's been offered a job in research in New York."

"Why New York?"

"He wants to leave Princeton, and his brother - is in New York."

This is almost too good to be true; 'almost', because New York is still too close for comfort. "You won't see him anymore?"

"I'll be visiting him every now and then, but I'm sure we can work it so that someone always accompanies me."

He leans back nursing his lager, trying to sort her compromising behaviour into a category that fits her. He can't find one, so he picks on the weak link in her chain of thought. "Someone?" he queries.

"Wilson has friends in Princeton who will want to see him too, and New York is just a step away from there."

"Why not me?"

"Well, if you're around ...," she says slowly.

He homes in on this at once. "Why are you bothering to kit a relationship with a man you hardly know and who you believe won't be around anyway?"

She draws patterns in the beads of condensed water on her glass. "Maybe because I hope that if we can settle this," she waves a hand between them, "then you _will_ be around?"

His stomach gives an odd satisfied lurch at that. Nevertheless, he can't let it rest there. If she still believes that he came to the USA solely to see her, then he has to disillusion her, fast. "I didn't cross the Atlantic to be with you," he says brutally. "You were just ..."

"... a convenient starting point," she concludes his sentence. "I know. You had maps and city guides scattered all over your hotel room right from the start, and you were more interested in earning money for your trip than in seeing me." She looks away. "I never thought you'd stay."

"So what exactly do you want?"

"I don't know!" she says exasperatedly, "but anything has to be better than the past weeks, when it was anyone's guess where you were and what you were up to."

He constructs an edifice with beer coasters, using two coasters leaning against each other as supports and balancing more on top. "There've been other women," he says as he carefully balances a second level on top of the first one.

"You ... want an open arrangement," she says dubiously.

He makes the mistake of looking up - one side of the structure promptly collapses. Lisa, who is chewing her lower lip, grabs her purse.

"I can't," she states, pushing her chair back and rising, bumping against the table in the process. The collision brings down the rest of his edifice.

"No, wait! That's not ... I meant during the past weeks when we weren't - whatever we are now."

"You mean, you had other women after you dumped me?" For some reason being dumped by him seems to give her a macabre sense of satisfaction. He nods. "But you'd stay faithful if we got things sorted."

"Yes, you idiot!" he almost yells, his relief at her having understood him tinged with annoyance at her harping on the fact that he'd walked out on her. He hadn't wanted to dump her. Yes, he'd thought about it before that afternoon with James Wilson, but when he'd suddenly been faced with the necessity of doing so to protect himself, he had realised how little he wanted to do it. Clearly, he isn't cut out to be a dumpster.

"Oh. Well, spare me the tales of your floozies and hookers."

Her summary of his sexual activities is eerily apt; he has discovered the hard way that getting chatted up in bars by strange women is not a Good Reason to have sex. The last encounter left him standing in a Boston suburb in the middle of the night with slit tires courtesy of the boyfriend whom his chance acquaintance had been trying to make jealous by picking up strangers in bars. After doing the math on that - three drinks (not counting his own) and one set of new tires, for _one_ night of uninspiring sex - he'd come to the conclusion that a hooker offered better value for his money.

He's had no opportunity to put his new insight into practice because the sight of the slit tires put him in mind of another victim of senseless violence, upon which he phoned Lisa at five in the morning just to make sure she was okay, resulting in her turning up this weekend. That's just fine with him, because now he doesn't need to ponder the economics of hookers versus middle-aged frustrated suburban wives. No, he doesn't need an open arrangement; he's sure he can manage with porn and an old sock if there's a chance of a little something whenever he's in the vicinity of Philadelphia. But he can't let his sense of relief take over yet; there's still one small matter to be clarified. She has left a loophole, and if she thinks he hasn't noticed it, she's sadly mistaken.

"What about the coming weekend?"

"What about it?" she asks back, avoiding his eyes.

"Isn't James due to have another stress test, now that he's so close to his release?"

"Yes, but there's a function at his old hospital in Princeton that he wants to attend, so he'll be staying with friends there." She pauses, and then she looks at him challengingly. "I'll be attending, too, but we'll both be surrounded by roughly five hundred other people, so I think I should be fine."

"Five hundred people - what function is that?" he wonders, intrigued by the ambivalence she's showing. It sounds harmless - ideal, really, as far as her safety with regard to James is concerned -, but she's showing an unwarranted reluctance to talk about the do. There must be a hitch somewhere.

"PPTH is celebrating its 125th anniversary," she says, brushing it aside.

"So what's the problem?" he asks directly.

"There is no problem," she insists. When he raises his eyebrows, she rolls her eyes and says, "Okay, there _is_ a problem. They more or less fired me four years ago when I took a longer leave of absence because of Rachel ... and my PTSD. I pre-empted them by resigning of my own accord, and I haven't been back since then."

"Then why are you going, if you're still bitter about it?"

"I'm not. It was business pure and simple, a poker game, and I lost that one. But returning there for a big event that will be attended by all the people who effectively went behind my back to get rid of me is going to be awkward. I don't think Wilson should go either, but since he's going, I want to be there to support him. It's complicated, that's all, okay?"

He lets it rest, because she doesn't seem to be hiding anything regarding James, but he can't rid himself of the feeling that she isn't being completely open about this.

"I need to talk about this to Wilson, though. He has a right to know why I'm behaving so ridiculously. I'll drive him down to Princeton next Saturday and tell him on the way."

"Alone?"

"I'm not taking Rachel along," she answers, deliberately misunderstanding him.

He gets up, showing his opinion of this unmistakeably.

"Sit down, Pete!" she orders. He doesn't sit down, but he doesn't move away either. She rises and walks over to him, moving into his personal space to glower up at him. "I am agreeing to your demands, which are _unnecessary_ and an _insult_ to Wilson." She pokes him in his chest at each item to underline the message. "In return, you will grant me the opportunity to explain this to Wilson in a fashion that is not demeaning to either of us. That's called a 'compromise'."

"Compromises stink. There are logical arguments, and there are crappy arguments. Mine are either one or the other. Why are you agreeing to my 'demands' if you consider them so ridiculous? Why are you discussing this with me when a few weeks ago it was 'do or die'?" he asks, leaning over her in turn.

She exhales, long and slow. They are now receiving exactly the attention that he was trying to avoid by choosing a nook table, but at the moment he couldn't care less. At this point in their confrontation his awareness of his surroundings is focused solely on sounding how they can be used to his advantage. He has discovered that most people don't like public scenes, and he has used this knowledge a number of times to win confrontations; if your behaviour is outrageous enough, your adversary will back down in order to curtail the scene. It doesn't work with Lisa - she seems as immune to the stares and whispers as he is.

"My therapist ...," she says carefully. He gives a short laugh of derision at that, upon which she gives him a warning glare. "My therapist," she repeats, "advised me to objectify our relationship."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"Can we sit?" she asks, gesturing at the table. So she _is_ aware of the attention they are receiving. She's simply ignoring it manfully so as not to give in to him. Kudos to her. He sits down, but with one arm draped openly over the back of his chair in an 'I'm ready to jump up and leave' sort of pose.

"It means that I shouldn't regard the relationship as an integral part of myself, with its success or failure reflecting on me as a person," Lisa continues, with the slightest hint of quoting someone.

"Oh, I see," he says sarcastically. "More like an item of clothing - underwear, that you throw away when you're done with it."

"Bad simile," she says smugly. "My underwear gets washed, folded and put away neatly, and I know exactly what I have. No." She fiddles with her necklace, a blue chalcedony pendant. "I'm supposed to regard it like a patient that needs to be diagnosed, and chances are that your diagnosis is as accurate as mine is."

" _More_ accurate," he can't help amending.

"It's not a _real_ patient," she says repressively, "so I estimate that my diagnosis is as accurate as yours. But I owe it to you as fellow physician of this patient to take your opinion seriously and to implement any course of treatment that you suggest as long as it doesn't endanger the patient's life."

It's a lot of bullshit, of course - how the hell is a relationship supposed to survive if either side has to put up with dumbfuckery just to keep the other side happy? But it's so glaringly difficult for Lisa to make this concession that it's a pleasure to listen to her stumble her way through a bunch of hollow platitudes, a joy that he wouldn't want to miss. In her list of _Top Ten Humiliating Experiences_ this one probably ranks among the top three, and he has bagged a front row seat. If this is how 'compromise' will work for them - total humiliation of one party to the boundless amusement of the other party - hey, then he's all for it. Even if it means that she'll drive Wilson to Princeton.

But of course he can't let it rest at that, not when the red rag 'therapist' has been waved in front of his nose. "Let me see if I got this: I'm _blatantly_ right. You choose not to listen to me, leaving me with no choice but to break up. You run to your therapist, who repeats what I said, but instead of listening to me in the first place you listen to your therapist instead, and only then come running back to me. Right? Can't we shorten this process," he rolls a hand illustratively, "and have you listening to me right from the start?"

She sits there, her lips moving - he's prepared to bet that she's counting to ten or possibly even to twenty before retorting-, any number of murderous emotions chasing across her face. After a long pause (it may even have been fifty), she says with forced calm, "Believe me, _this_ \- me listening to my therapist, to anyone _at all_ \- is already a huge step forward. Don't push it!"

He observes the shine in her eyes, the slight tremble of her lips, and impulsively leans forward to give her a quick peck across the table. A group of older ladies at the next table - Girls' Night Out - breaks into applause.

"Let's get outta here," he says, and takes her hand.

Eight hours later he lies in bed with Lisa curled up loosely against him, watching the sunlight peek through the threadbare curtains and meditating on Good Reasons for having sex. Being on the same page as one's partner could be one. He'd anticipated a lot of ripping off of clothes, wild fumbling and hasty release of pent-up sexual drive once they reached his motel, but instead it had been a slow, conscious affair, a thorough re-discovery of each other's bodies, a leisurely apology for whatever wrongs they had done each other. He knows he pushed her too hard over James, but that isn't something he'll ever be able to verbalise, so he's only too glad to be able to express this in other ways. And a few hours later, when he'd woken up to find her spooned up against him, her shapely ass pressed into his groin, it had done funny things to him that he wouldn't have thought possible, not at his age and so briefly after his previous exertions. So they had done it again, with even less pomp and circumstances. It's all very uncomplicated and familiar, and a lot different from the fast, dirty sex he's used to from his one-night stands. _That's_ rather like picking someone's pocket. You get their wallet with some cash, a few credit cards (useless without PIN numbers), and possibly an ID with a crappy photo of its owner. This thing with Lisa is more like breaking into someone's house: it's a lot more of an effort and very dangerous, but once inside, you can get hold of their technical gadgets, their jewellery, and their other valuables. You can root among their clothes, leaf through their albums, raid their refrigerators. You're in their life, with insight into their personality.

Sex with strangers, he decides, is overrated. He knows all the behavioural theories that state that he's basically hardwired to scatter his DNA as widely as possible, so this may just be his personal view based on the complications that ensue when one has a major disability, but he can't for the life of him see what advantages a romp in the sheets with someone who knows neither his preferences nor his limitations is supposed to offer him. After all, it isn't as though the sex in a relationship can actually get _worse_ over the course of time; more predictable - yes; boring - possibly, if one can't be bothered to invest time and energy into enlivening the experience. But even the momentary thrill of a new conquest can't make up for all that ungainly fumbling while one gets one's bearings, the fear of arousing disgust or failing to make the mark, the awkwardness of the morning after (if one stays that long) or the loneliness afterwards.

And that, he thinks, trailing one hand along her back leisurely, doesn't even take into account that a chance bar acquaintance is unlikely to go down on him.

Lisa groans, half-awake. "I can hear you thinking. What's up?"

"Just thinking about getting some head," he answers truthfully.

Lisa can convey 'rolling her eyes in exasperation' even when her eyes are clamped shut. "Oh, God! Not now. ... Go, do something. Keep busy, play the piano or something, but let me sleep." She must have got up in the middle of the night yesterday to get all her work done before leaving for Boston in the middle of the day.

He disentangles himself from her and gets up, strapping on his prosthetic and slipping into boxer shorts and a T-shirt. 'Not now' means, 'later, possibly' - if he doesn't piss her off, so it's advisable to do her bidding. He doesn't have a piano - where does she think he's staying, the Ritz? - but he bought a guitar in a pawn shop. He gets it out and sits down on the only chair, a hardback, resting his legs on the bed and strumming a few experimental chords. Then he starts singing quietly.

_Feelin' good, feelin' good,  
All the money in the world spent on feelin' good._

Lisa groans and buries her head in the pillow. After a while she gives up, re-surfaces and starts listening.

The problem with this 'being on the same page' thing with Lisa is that maybe they're reading the same sentences at the moment, when it's all about smut, but they seem to be reading different books. Her book is a typical chick holiday read, where a woman, frustrated by life and screwed over by worthless assholes and losers, meets the one true love of her life, the man the stars destined for her and of whom she has to prove herself worthy by overcoming all the ridiculous obstacles that fate chooses to plant in her way. His, in contrast, is a sort of James Bond/Jason Bourne remix, in which the hero, a noble broody screw-up who has been hoodwinked by the people who are supposed to support him seeks his identity, aided by sexy chicks whom he recompenses for their assistance by fulfilling their sexual fantasies. Since by some odd quirk of metafictional irony their two books share the smutty pages, will the two stories drift apart again or will the plots end up hopelessly intertwined, with his knightly quest ending in a morass of domestic woes while her dreams of a perfect union are tarnished by the realities of life with a moody, potentially criminal jackass?

Lisa stretches and gets up. He relishes the sight of her naked body bending over as she retrieves some items of clothing from her overnight bag, and he can't help tipping his head in appreciation when she stands before him in a bright pink top and the skimpiest of black shorts with a pair of trainers in her hands. He slips into _Slow Down_.

_Slow down, slow down,_   
_Let me step on board,_   
_I just wanna ride your Train,_   
_One time before you're gone._

"I'm not going anywhere before tomorrow," she notes, "and if you come for a run with me, you can have your blow-job afterwards under the shower."

Definitely on the same page there. He puts down the guitar, untangles his legs and moves over to where his flex blade leans against the wall. He picks it up and rotates it with one hand, saying, "You know that with this, I'll streak past you leaving you choking in a cloud of dust."

She smiles confidently. "You know that the best view you'll get of my ass is from behind."


	14. The Gathering of the Clouds

_**Part III: Princeton**_

When Wilson passes Nolan's office with his overnight bag, Nolan is waiting to intercept him.

"You're sure about this, James?" he asks, concern in his eyes.

"Yes," he answers, looking straight into Nolan's eyes. "If I can't manage this, how will I cope with getting released, starting to work again in a strange environment and building up new relationships?"

"You know my opinion on this, but it's your own decision. You realise that it wasn't just House in Princeton who encouraged your unconstructive behavioural patterns? Princeton is no island of bliss just because House isn't there anymore."

"Yes, I realise that. But people are the same everywhere. Once I've been in New York for a while, I'll also be tempted to fall back into enabling patterns there."

"Very well," Nolan says. "Here's your pass." He pats Wilson on the shoulder. "Have fun!"

Wilson switches the bag to his other hand so as to pull open the heavy front door with his stronger left arm. He is greeted by a low-standing, but warm October sun. Early autumn is showing itself from its best side. The trees around him are decked in bright reds and oranges, the air is mellow, a squirrel bounds across the lawn to his left. A little way down the drive Cuddy is waiting beside her car; she knows he's punctual so she hasn't bothered to pull into the parking lot next to the main building. She is dressed in a black dress that is cut out low in the back but flares out below the waist, with a pearl necklace and matching earrings. Her shoes, though, are sensible; for driving down and back, he guesses. She'll have a pair of her killer heels in the car.

"All set?" she asks as he approaches. He nods, giving his tie a quick tug. She steps forward to give him an awkward hug. Appraising his overnight bag she says, "It's so small you can toss it in the back seat. Come!"

"You look good," he says somewhat belatedly.

"So do you," she returns, sliding behind the steering wheel. As they pass the gates she says, "I won't be staying overnight, but Cameron will bring you back tomorrow."

"Oh." He feels steam-rolled, a ridiculous reaction considering the irrelevance of the change in plans. He is to spend the night at Allison's place anyway, and it really makes no difference who brings him back to Mayfield. He closes his eyes and tries to analyse his reaction, as he's been taught to do. It's not the fact that the plans have changed that is upsetting him; he's stressed out by what he'll face at PPTH today - the surreptitious glances and whispers, the ex-colleagues exuding jovial bonhomie while they pretend to believe his story that he's always pined for a job in research, his staff biding him a tearful farewell. He has been clinging to routine and predictability these past days in an effort to counter the panic that rises in him when he thinks of the evening ahead of him. For a moment he considers telling Cuddy to turn the car and take him back, but no. He has had no chance to say goodbye, to close with this chapter of his life, the one that encompassed both his longest professional commitment and his most enduring personal relationship. If he starts afresh in New York without taking leave of his former existence, it'll always be niggling at him at the back of his head, suggesting that what he left behind was far better, more fulfilling, more satisfying than what he has now.

"Problems with the babysitter?" he asks, more out of politeness than real interest. Cuddy's childcare problems are the last thing on his mind at the moment.

"No, not really," Cuddy pronounces carefully. Her tone makes his head swivel around; so far his eyes have been trained on the road, as though fixing the tarmac with his stare will make the miles pass slower. Cuddy's eyes are on the traffic, but her lips are working, as though trying out the taste of the words that lie on them. "I promised Pete that I wouldn't spend any more time alone with you."

In his state of nervous befuddlement it takes him a few seconds to decipher what she just said. "You mean _House_ ," he says, surprised and disapproving on more than one count. Her calling House 'Pete' is ridiculous; _House_ may not know that he's not Pete, but both of them do, and referring to him by his false identity is plain stupid. But that's the least of his many objections to her statement.

"I went to Boston to see him last weekend."

His mind reels at that, so he says the first thing that makes it from his brain to his tongue. "I thought you were at a conference."

"I lied," she says with no sign of guilt.

"Cuddy, this is insane! What are you trying to do?"

"I'd say that's pretty obvious: stay in contact with him and get some sort of relationship up and moving." She says this calmly, as though it were the most natural of impulses to want closer communion with House. Which it is, but it carries with it a truckload of dynamite.

"I thought you said you ended it." A feeling of impending doom claws at his chest. How can she talk so calmly about meeting House when she's opening the gateway to chaos by doing so?

"No. I didn't specify who ended it, but _he_ did. Not because we weren't on the same page, though. He objected to my seeing you."

"So you've decided that the best way to deal with the unfounded jealousy of a guy who already parked his car in your house once on seeing you with another man is to eschew all contact with other members of the male sex," he says with bitter irony, "because then nothing can go wrong anymore."

Cuddy wrinkles up her nose. "It isn't jealousy per se. Pete is worried that you'll get abusive if I give you the notion that there could be something between us again."

" _Excellent_ point! Except that you've got the protagonist and the antagonist mixed up."

She casts a sideway glance at him. He wishes she wouldn't - traffic is dense on the freeway, and fast. " _He_ has, not me."

"Wait, wait, let me see whether I got this right." He's waving his hands around in front of him in choppy movements that he'd like to be able to control better. "You're forsaking me and abandoning our friendship because your present love interest - who _happens_ to be House, but it probably is of no consequence who he is - has absolutely ludicrous objections to me?"

Cuddy abruptly pulls up in an emergency bay. "Okay," she says, "let's have this out." She turns towards Wilson as far as her seatbelt will allow her. "My 'love interest's' objection is perfectly reasonable from _his_ point of view. He assumes (a) that you are a former lover of mine, and (b) that you tried to murder me. Either one would suffice to make most men object to their girlfriends spending any time with you _at all_ , let alone on a one-to-one basis. If you want to take a stand on this, if my friendship is that important to you, go ahead! Tell him the truth! I won't try to stop you."

He is floundering - he has a bad feeling about where this is going. "Telling House who he is and what he did would be cruel. We've been through this before; you agreed with me there." He looks at her appealingly. "You can't expect me to do that. Look, I gave up House's friendship to enable him to become happy, and you know what his friendship meant to me." He closes his eyes briefly at the memory of the past years that he had to survive without his curious bond with House to carry him through. "Can't you do the same?"

"No, because that isn't the choice I'm having to make. _You_ ," she pokes a finger in his chest, "are saying that I should give up what I have with Pete in order to continue this friendship - if that's what it is - with you. I'm saying that if I have to choose, I'll choose Pete."

"You mean _House_ ," he corrects austerely. Cuddy believes that if she gives House a new identity, she can somehow change the man and mould him into who she wants him to be. But House is House, brilliant, screwed-up and unmanageable, no matter what name one gives him; and _Peter_ is definitely too tame for those wild, primal forces at work in him.

Cuddy takes only a brief moment to consider this. "No, I mean _Pete_. I will not let you dictate how I think of him. And you're hardly in a position to object to my priorities. You always put House first, before your marriages even, and you certainly always put him before _me_."

He can understand that Cuddy would bring this up; he isn't proud of how he handled his private life in the past, but that's neither here nor there. He can't grasp that Cuddy is so willing to shut her eyes to the real danger of what she is doing. "The more he sees and hears of you, the more likely he is to run into someone or something that tells him who he is and what he did. By _choosing_ him, as you term it, you're precipitating him into his past."

"You can't be so naive as to believe that he won't discover his past sooner or later. I saw his travel itinerary - after Boston he wants to head south to Maryland. That means he's heading for Johns Hopkins." Cuddy touches her forehead briefly with her fingertips. "Even if he doesn't find himself in the archives, we'd have to be really lucky for him not to run into someone he knows over there. I'm surprised it didn't happen in New York. There must be people he went to med school with, people he met at conferences before the infarction, people who know him by sight, at med schools all over the country. And don't even tell me they won't recognise him. He was notorious all of his life, and now that he's clean shaven and halfway groomed again, he's very, very recognisable. He looks like he did at Michigan, plus thirty years."

Wilson pinches the bridge of his nose. "Even if this didn't affect our friendship, I'd still object, and you know that. You kept it a secret from me for that reason." She doesn't deny it. "Four years ago, you and House had a relationship that was a disaster from beginning to end." She stares at him in disbelief. "Oh, come on, Cuddy! You were on the verge of dumping him right from the start. I don't even know why you bothered to start that relationship at all, the way you carried on."

"Crap!" Cuddy says. She looks at him as if seeing him for the first time. "You really have no idea, do you?"

"I know," he says angrily, "that you were constantly threatening to break up if he didn't do as you wanted." Looking back, he wonders what made him push House into that pool of sharks. That House had lost all sense of reality at the chance of dating Cuddy was understandable; that he, Wilson, had done so too and encouraged his friend's idiocy was unforgiveable.

"No." She laughs in disbelief. "There was never any danger of a break-up before my cancer scare. House knew it and I knew it. That's why I could afford to insist on the things that were important to me, and he could afford to play games with me before giving in."

"And if he hadn't given in?"

"I _knew_ he'd give in," she says with absolute certainty.

"What, when you made him promise never to lie to you, you knew he'd do it?" The whole ridiculous episode still makes his teeth feel as though he's hearing chalk scrape over a blackboard: House wondering whether to endanger his patient for Cuddy's sake, House trying his best to convince Cuddy that he'd done no wrong, House attending that goddam wedding, the one where he, Wilson, got dumped by Sam, to placate Cuddy ...

"Yes." She throws up her hands. "Wilson, I'm not an idiot. I only pick battles that I _know_ I can win. I avoid the rest. I knew he'd give in and promise he'd never lie to me; I also knew he wouldn't keep that promise."

"Then _why_ ..."

"Because I wanted to be sure that he'd never do it light-heartedly, just because he _could_. Because that's what he did: he did things simply because he could, because no one stopped him. The only time we ever got close to a break-up before that final fiasco was when I made him treat my mother."

"Yes, I was somewhat surprised to hear that he'd agreed to that," he says tightly.

"Oh, _treating_ her wasn't the problem - I knew he'd cave on that. The problem started when she threatened to kill herself by getting transferred to Princeton General. If I hadn't stopped her from leaving, I would have lost House - he'd have dumped me as unceremoniously as I dumped him later - so I brought my mother back." She smiles reminiscently. "His patients were the only things he really cared about. The rest was all bluster."

Looking back at those turbulent months four years ago, he considers her view of things. She _could_ be right, he concedes reluctantly. House may not have been happy at having to go without for longer periods of time, but he was never fazed or seriously bothered during all their minor and major tiffs, not the way he was when she finally dumped him.

"So all that fuss was just you showing him and the world that you had him beaten." He doesn't bother about tactful phrasing, he's that pissed. And he really, _really_ doesn't like the way she talks of House in the past tense, as though he doesn't exist anymore and his body has been taken over by some benevolent alien, some pod person.

Her tightened lips show that she has caught his mood. "If you want to put it that way, yes. More about convincing myself than the world, though. House was someone who did _what_ he liked, _when_ he liked and _how_ he liked it. It was challenging enough dealing with that at the hospital, but having it in my private life too, losing all control, was overwhelming. All those power games - that was me trying to convince myself that I had House under control and that therefore nothing could go wrong, no matter how much he tried to screw things up." She fiddles with her pearls. "You know, what I wanted was someone who'd support me and who'd get along with Rachel. What I got was someone who couldn't have cared less about Rachel ..."

"He liked Rachel," Wilson feels obliged to protest.

"Like hell he did! He resented her at first and tolerated her later, but he certainly never liked her. Maybe someday he would have _loved_ her, but 'like' is one of those wishy-washy emotions that House didn't do. There's a world of difference in the way _you_ interact with Rachel, listening to her and playing with her, and the way _he_ only noticed her when who she was impacted our relationship. And instead of giving support when I needed it, he went and got himself into a state where _he_ needed support. I knew all this when I got into the relationship, but I chose to close both my eyes to the truth. "

"What makes you think he's changed so much? He still won't like Rachel, and I doubt he's that much more of a pillar of strength and a rock in the tempest than he was before. This is going to go down the same route to hell as the last time."

"This," Cuddy says wryly, "isn't going to last long enough to go down any route at all. Pete is going to find out any day now who he is, and he isn't going to like it. At all. He won't want to be in a relationship with a woman who's seen his worst side, not when there are millions of others who only know his new unsullied _persona_."

"Then why are you doing this?" he asks desperately. "You are pursuing a guy who, you say, is totally unsuitable relationship material and who you're sure will leave you any second now. What do you hope to gain by this?"

Cuddy sighs. "A few moments of happiness. First I tried relationships with guys who fitted my notion of what I needed - steadiness, reliability, etc. - and it didn't work. Then I tried a relationship with a guy I wanted, and tried to fit him into my notion of what Rachel and I needed, and it didn't work." She throws up her hands. "I'm not even _thinking_ of where this is going or whether it has a chance. It doesn't. I'm doing something for myself with no regard for the long-term consequences."

Somehow that doesn't sound new. It sounds exactly like what Cuddy has been doing all her life, but there seems little sense in telling her that. "Isn't that a bit irresponsible?" Wilson ventures.

"The last time I did something responsible and sober was when I dumped House. Although neither he nor I ever put it into so many words, we both knew I was doing it because of Rachel." She is silent, searching for words. "If I'd only had to think about myself, I'd have given it a chance, but the cancer crisis showed me that I'd need to invest a lot of time keeping him on his feet, time that I owed Rachel. It wasn't so much that he wasn't a father-figure, although there was that too. It's more that he was so high maintenance when things got rough that you couldn't really have a kid _and_ him. And he knew that - he said right at the start that he was an insane choice for a mother. So, I dumped him, thinking it was best for Rachel, and that set off the chain of events that put Rachel into a wheelchair."

"You're blaming him for Rachel's disability," Wilson states, his eyes narrowed.

"No. I'm blaming myself. I should have known that he'd let his anger and frustration out on _someone_ , and the obvious choice would have been Rachel, so I'm lucky he chose to take it out on me - I don't for a moment think that he was aiming to hurt Rachel in any way. I was an idiot to start something with a guy who could become a danger to my child and even more of an idiot to believe I could shield her from the consequences of our break-up."

He's confused now, in a not-so-good way. "You said," he says slowly, "that you believed me when I said that he was trying to commit suicide."

She leans her forehead on the steering wheel. "That's what I _want_ to believe. But I'll never really know, will I? And even if he was, he was doing it to get even with me."

"Okay … let's sum this up. You insist on continuing a relationship with a guy who is going to dump you in the near future, who is potentially abusive and who is not cut out to fit into your family life, and this makes sense to you because," he flicks a hand illustratively, "when you do things the right way, they go wrong. You have therefore come to the conclusion that if you do things the wrong way, they'll turn out right. Hmmm, interesting. The logical fallacy lies in your assumption that because A (doing things right) implies B (things go wrong), the reverse – B implies A - is true too."

Cuddy sits up and snorts. "A, you've lost me. B, you and House may find these verbal games funny, but I'm not intrigued by logic at the moment. Nor am I interested in what you think of what I'm doing. I have spent _years_ listening to you telling me what's best for House."

She lowers her voice to mimic him. "' _Let's make House detox, so that he'll realise he's an addict, but he can't know it's_ my _idea_.' - _'Let's not tell him he cured his last patient because it'll increase his hubris, but don't tell him it was_ my _idea_.' - _'Let's make a deal with Tritter_...' Oh, wait, you never told me about that _before_ you did it; you went and did it, and _I_ had to commit perjury to keep House out of jail. Now you've fried his brain, and I'm supposed to support your efforts to keep that from backfiring. Well, I'm sorry, but I'm not playing your games any longer. This amnesia plot wasn't _my_ idea, no one asked me, and heaven knows I would never have approved had I known of it. You can't make me stick to rules that you make up along the way, in a game that I never agreed to play."

"This is not a game! You are endangering House's well-being - again! You're _assuming_ that this time things will go well, because you believe he doesn't care about you. What if you're wrong? What if he crashes again? He nearly _died_ the last time you dumped him; his blood will be on your head!"

Cuddy's eyes flash, and he's happy she's restrained by her seat belt. "Oh no, you don't get to do this, Wilson! I'm prepared to take the responsibility for _my_ actions, but not for his. Yes, I was wrong to start a relationship with him the last time, and maybe I was wrong to dump him - I don't know. But what he did and what he made of the situation is on him, not on me. I'm responsible for the hurt I caused him, but not for the way he chose to cope with his feelings. And you - _you_ certainly don't get to blame me. You walked out on him when Amber died. You are nothing but a self-righteous dick!"

She starts the car and pulls out of the bay with screeching tires.

"Oh, wow!" Wilson says, mostly to himself.

* * *

He's done in Boston, and he wants to head south, via Baltimore (Johns Hopkins) to Norfolk (Eastern Virginia Medical School), Atlanta (Emory) and then south to Florida. Since Princeton is on the way, he may as well drop in there this weekend. It isn't that he doesn't trust _her_ ; it's James he doesn't trust. So he travels down to Princeton on Saturday morning to check out the place. He can skip the university since it doesn't have a medical department. As for the hospital, it would be interesting to nose around in it to find out a bit more about James. It'll have to be after the Anniversary Gala that Lisa is attending, because he's conspicuous and he'd rather not have Lisa find out that he's microscoping her professional and private past.

He drives past the hospital a couple of times before he pulls into the parking lot. A part of it is cordoned off, and there's a lot of bustle at the front entrance, with delivery vans unloading everything from folding tables to cutlery. Maybe he can get inside and look around under cover of all this hullaballoo without drawing any attention to himself.

He walks over to the main entrance. It is festooned with a big banner proclaiming ' _Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital - 125 Years of Medical and Academic Excellence_ '. No false modesty here. The hospital itself is a red-brick neo-gothic structure with two wings, augmented by a modern expansion connecting the original two wings and surrounded by well-tended lawns interspersed with wooden benches. It's an architectural catastrophe, and it's probably no fun whatsoever to maintain the older part of the hospital according to modern medical standards. He sits down on a strategically positioned bench and observes the comings and goings of the delivery personnel and the maintenance crew. He'd like to go in carrying something so that the slight unevenness of his gait is attributed to his load, so he gets up and goes to the largest of the delivery vans, one of a fleet of three from Princeton Caterers. Two men are unloading boxes and crates from the back of the van, a third is stacking the boxes that are handed down to him onto a two-wheeler.

"Hey," he says by way of greeting as he comes up behind the third man. The man jumps, dropping the box he just received from his mate. There's a resounding crash and the tinkle of breaking glass, followed by a round of curses.

"You crazy or something?" the man yells at him.

He puts up both hands in a defensive gesture - he doesn't feel like getting socked on the nose by some paranoid hunk. This one sports too much muscle and too many tattoos for him to risk aggravating him.

One of the men on the back of the van leans down. "What box was that?"

The hunk leans down for a look. "It says 'Glasses, white wine.'" He opens the box and peers inside, shrugs and tosses the box to the side. "We c'n forget those."

"Jason, you're an idiot," the man on the back of the van says. "That's the _second_ crate you've dropped today."

"Am not! What does it matter? We've already unpacked at least three boxes of these. How much wine can people drink?"

"The other boxes were _red_ wine glasses," his colleague says tiredly. "We need both."

"Let the big-wigs drink their white wine from the red wine glasses! They look the same, don't they?" the jumpy hunk says, pointing at the pictograms on the boxes.

"Red wine glasses are larger," Pete can't help pointing out, "and you need both on the table, the white wine to go with fish and poultry, the red one for red meats."

"You!" Jumpy Guy barks. "Don't interfere! You caused this!"

"Wait," the guy on the van says, looking him over. "You know about this kind of stuff?"

"It's not exactly a state secret," Pete says. "And this guy's problem isn't just ignorance, it's his drug consumption. Hey, get off of me!" He's on his butt, dabbing his nose, his head ringing.

The two men in the back of the van jump down and pull Dope Head aside before he can cause more damage. There's a vociferous altercation that ends with Jumpy Jason becoming once more a recipient of whatever largesse the government of the USA distributes to the large masses of unemployed, and then one of the others, a short man in his mid-forties who looks more like a bookkeeper than a labourer comes back to him and holds out a hand to hoist him up.

"Look, I'm sorry. We didn't realise that Jason has ... problems. Do you need someone to see to your nose?" He tips his head back towards the hospital entrance.

No, he doesn't. Going in there as a patient is the surest way to alert Lisa to his presence here; she's bound to gossip with the nurses when she comes, and knowing Lisa, she'll be wondering whether he'll dare turn up. He's seldom met anyone who is so privy to his little subterfuges.

"It's fine," he mumbles.

Jason is moving off, turning round to flip him the bird, and uttering curses and imprecations at him and at his former boss once he's at a safe distance.

"No loss," says the other man, who has been taciturn till now.

"You need help here?" Pete offers.

Both remaining men look him over dubiously. "You got a problem with that leg?" the older man says.

"I got a problem with my finances," he returns.

"You know how to set up a table the right way?"

"Worked in major restaurants for years." A slight exaggeration, but perfectly valid as a rhetorical device. "Setting a table isn't rocket science."

The bookkeeper type tips his head towards the hospital. "Come along."

"Don't you have to ask your boss before you give strangers a job?"

"I _am_ the boss," the bookkeeper says drily. Now Pete looks him up and down. The bookkeeper/boss shrugs. " _I_ got a problem with my staff," he says, "and I've got a major do here in three hours. You in?"

He nods.

Two hours later he has been promoted from setting tables to supervising the catering staff, which suits him just fine. He can't believe his luck, for it's the ideal cover for hanging around the hospital. The gala dinner is to take place in the lobby, a light glass structure rising up over several floors surrounded by a gallery on the second floor. The room is now set out with round tables with a seating capacity of eight persons each. A small stage has been set up near the entrance doors - an odd place for it, but the choice was obviously dictated by technical considerations: the wall above the doors is covered with a white screen on which technicians are now projecting pictures of the hospital over the past century or so. The catering service has been assigned two meeting rooms branching off the gallery on the second floor for their supplies, because there are no suitable rooms on the first floor within easy distance of the lobby. One room harbours all the silverware, crockery and glassware that isn't needed at present and big basins for dirty dishes; in the other the food that was delivered a few minutes ago in steel basins is being kept warm, while crate upon crate of champagne, wine and beer are stacked along one of the walls.

The downside of belonging to the catering staff is running around in a get-up that makes him look like an anorexic penguin; the upside is that he can observe everything without being seen himself. He has discovered that the medical staff doesn't take any notice of all these strangers bustling around in their territory. This is what slaves in Ancient Rome must have felt like - indispensable, but ignored completely. If the president turned up over here he probably wouldn't be noticed provided he stood behind the bar dressed in a white shirt and black pants dispensing champagne. Furthermore, the gallery on the second floor gives him an ideal vantage point. He can observe most of the tables and he has an excellent view of the entrance while he himself will be practically invisible to the people sitting below. He'll actually be able to keep an eye on Lisa without attracting her attention.

At the moment he is being treated to the sight of some administrator, the dean's PA judging by his age and his general air of incompetence, having a meltdown because the audio system is not working. A tall greying man in a tux enters from somewhere downstage left. The effect is instantaneous - a whole crowd, technical and medical staff all mixed, immediately converges on him, jabbering wildly, pointing in different directions, yelling each other down. The patriarch raises both hands in a gesture akin to a blessing while taking a step backwards. Then he picks out supplicants one after the other, gives them instructions or placates them - it's difficult to tell from a distance - and sends them on their way. Soon he has reduced the crowd around him to a small group dressed in tuxedos or evening dresses themselves - leading staff members, one assumes. These he gathers around him like a prophet his disciples; he gestures, points, and calls their attention to a sheet of paper that he has on a clipboard. The group around him nods at every point he makes and peers over his shoulder at what is probably an agenda for the evening; every now and then there's a question; then, as the sound system springs back to life with a deafening screech, the group below disperse to their various posts. The dean, for such he probably is, takes up a post close to the entrance. Behind him is a table set out with champagne glasses; beside him is one of the disciples, a woman in her mid-thirties with dark hair, stunningly dressed in a long red gown. Real eye candy, that woman - it's no wonder she got chosen for that task.

In the room behind him his new boss, Rick, is shouting at one of the waiters. The waiters all seem to be students from the university, hired at minimum wages and too bright to know a fork from a knife. " _This_ is what the plate is supposed to look like. You arrange the food like _this_ , not in wild heaps all over the plate. The meat here; the vegetables down here. You garnish with two of these and one of those; you do _not_ smother the whole plate with lettuce!"

He turns around to watch. Is Rick really letting those Bright Young Things arrange the food on the plates? He should have hired a few competent housewives - just as cheap and a lot more efficient. Who needs calculus to feed the hungry masses? Then he sees the food arrangement that Rick has created as a template to be copied by those arranging the food on the plates, and he abandons his post. It's a wonder Rick got the contract for this evening's gala dinner, the way he runs his company. He moves up behind Rick and plucks the plate out of his hands, tipping its contents into the garbage bin for leftovers. He does the same with the plate with the starter.

"That was crap," he says conversationally to Rick, who is gaping. " _This_ ," he says to the student, "is how you will arrange the food." And he proceeds to rearrange starter, main course and dessert according to an image in his mind of what the end product should look like.

It's swill, but by the time he's done, it's appetising swill, the geometric arrangement of the different forms and the colour contrasts offered by the garnishing a balm to the eye of the beholder. "Don't overload the plate, count everything! _Three_ leaves of arugula with _two_ cherry tomato wedges in the middle," he adds as a parting instruction. "You _can_ count, can't you?"

The student nods dumbly; Rick huffs ambiguously. "What?" Pete asks him challengingly.

"Nothing," Rick says, throwing up his hands. He turns to go. "Gotta make sure there's enough champagne down there. When I give you a sign, send someone with another ten bottles."

Watching the event unfold from his vantage point is edifying; it looks unplanned and informal, but in reality it's all carefully choreographed. The arriving guests are greeted by the couple at the door, the patriarchal dean and his mind-blowing sidekick, and then passed on to one of the other staff members. There's a clear ranking there: the important ones get more of the dean's time on arrival and are handed over to more senior staff members, men and women who are characterised by an air of confidence and self-assurance, who then seat the persons in question at tables of honour near the temporary stage. Less important guests get passed on quickly and unceremoniously to junior staff members. He wiles away the time playing a guessing game: he observes how long the dean and his brunette assistant talk with each arriving guest and then guesses where that guest will be seated. He's got it down to a T when Lisa and James arrive.

Their body language is a dead give-away. Lisa is striding rapidly, aggressively, so that James can barely keep up. She's got a poker face, but James's face, even from that distance, is somewhat chagrined, and he's lagging just slightly behind her. She must have told him, then, about their agreement that she shouldn't see him anymore. He can't help feeling pleased; some part of him was afraid that she'd let it slide in the hope that he'd never find out that she was still seeing James. Lisa is dressed conservatively in black and at first glance she's nowhere near as eye-catching as some of the other birds swirling around the lobby, but she draws his gaze magically by the sheer dynamic of her movements and her energy. He can feel his lips tug into a little smile as he watches her enter, and he wonders whether she'll be very mad at him when she finds out he's here. Because seeing her, he realises that he wants to leave with her, not alone, and spend the night with her. He'll take a break later and pin a note to the windshield of her car telling her to wait for him.

When Lisa comes up to the dean, she draws herself up a further couple of inches. She's still way smaller than he is, but what she lacks in height, she makes up in determination. The awkwardness is undeniable - Pete has been observing the dean for over half an hour now and can tell that his normally relaxed posture has become noticeably stiffer. He probably feels like a newly-wed whose mother-in-law is coming on an inspection of the family home. He passes Lisa on quickly to the woman next to him, whose greeting is considerably warmer. Lisa spends a long time chatting to her - he's prepared to bet that she knows all about the 'talking time is proportional to the importance of the guest' rule and is deliberately holding up the queue forming behind them - before being handed over to a fairly junior staff member, whom she promptly abandons in order to greet a much more senior staff member who is passing by. Within no time at all Lisa is hobnobbing with a sizeable group of doctors in the centre of the lobby where they can't but be noticed. _Atta girl_ , he thinks with something akin to parental pride. _You show them!_

James gets more quality time from his (former) dean and a warm hug from the woman in red. Pete has no idea whether James is still officially a staff member - he's still on the hospital's homepage as head of oncology, but that may just mean that HR has better things to do than update their staff pages. He, too, is soon surrounded by well-wishers, and that with no visible effort on his part; he's undeniably a popular person at the hospital. How he does it is a mystery to Pete; how the hell does someone who almost killed his boss, brought his hospital into disrepute and then drank himself into oblivion, manage to retain such unconditional acceptance among his peers and subordinates?

Once the lobby has filled and everyone is in their assigned seats - Lisa, he notes, is seated with James at a table that is ambiguously situated in the middle of the room - the dean opens the gala dinner with a speech. It's the usual trite stuff about the progress the hospital has made over the years, with a special focus on its importance today and in the future, a thinly veiled appeal to donors to keep the dough coming. Whatever his other qualities may be, the dean is no Cicero, so it's a blessing that he keeps it succinct. He is followed by the chairman of the board and a few others, notably the mayor of Princeton and the chairman of New Jersey's medical board, which is unfortunate for the guests, who won't get a bite to eat until all the speeches are over, but of little consequence to Pete, who can and does help himself to the supplies lodged behind him.

He's kept busy the next half-hour or so, checking every plate that goes down to ensure that what's on the plate is what's supposed to be on it, not some art student's weird _Still Life du Jour_. Once the dessert is out, there isn't much left for him to do - keeping the booze flowing doesn't require any of his mad skillz. So he goes back to his vantage point, a bottle of beer dangling loosely between his fingers.

When the dean announces that now the heads of departments will briefly introduce their specialities, the guests get restless; a steady migration to the bar ensues, and people start drifting from table to table to talk to other guests. Lisa takes the opportunity to network some more under cover of going to the bar to replenish her drink and James's soda; he counts a total of eight tables she stops at on the way there and back to exchange a few words, touch an arm or even hug someone in greeting. Pete now understands why Lisa and James are seated where they are: at the next table, one of the prominent ones, the Important Woman in Red is seated, so close that she barely needs to lean over to talk to James. She's too polite to do so while her colleagues sweat it out on the stage, but she glances over often enough, smiles, and does just about everything but jump the poor guy - although, in all honesty, James doesn't seem to mind. Every time he gives his bow tie a nervous little tug, one can be sure that a moment later he'll lean over to the next table and whisper a few words. The tugs are getting more frequent. One can only hope that the walls of the lady's house are sturdier than Lisa's were.

The department résumés are mind-numbingly boring; personally, he's just waiting for oncology to see how James's successor ships around the giant iceberg sitting smack in his line of vision. Watching Lisa ward off the advances of a tipsy overweight guest of honour (a donor, probably) is far more amusing; the covert way she manages to put a chair between him and herself even as she continues talking amiably with him speaks of years of practice. It spares him the bother of bribing one of the waiters to spill a glass of red wine over the creep's starched shirt. On second thought, why deny himself one of the simple pleasures of life? He's digging in his pocket to check for a bill of an appropriate denomination when the Lady in Red mounts the stage. She makes a good figure standing on the stage behind the microphone, one leg slightly angled so that her hip is clearly delineated under her clinging dress. Still, he wouldn't bother to listen if Lisa hadn't just swivelled around in her chair to give the woman her full attention instead of the fraction that her multi-tasking habits allotted to the previous speakers.

"Good evening. My name is Allison Cameron and today is not only a special day for PPTH, but also for my department, the Department of Diagnostic Medicine. We're small tonnage compared to our mighty mother ship, but this year Diagnostics celebrates its twentieth birthday."

There's polite applause. James's attention, like Lisa's is also all on the speaker, but in his case it's difficult to say whether it's the contents that interest him or the packaging. A blond man in his mid-thirties has approached Lisa's table, taking up a post close to her. Two more, an Afro-American of about the same age as the blond one, and a short balding man about ten years older, slide into seats left destitute by guests who have moved to the bar.

Dr Cameron presents the department's statistics, while the screen behind her lights up with appropriate pictures of laboratories, smiling staff members and grateful patients. "Our department, which in recent years has grown to encompass seven fellows and five residents, now has its own ward in the Woburn Wing of the hospital. We are able to offer our patients excellent care even as we fulfil our duty to educating future professionals by offering rotations to students affiliated to the hospital."

There's a staff picture shot outside on the grounds on a sunny spring day, then a quick switch to a corridor with a nurses' desk in front and a glass-fronted room behind, in which a patient lies in a bed surrounded by about ten people pretending to be studying his charts and monitoring his equipment.

Lisa, who is frowning, leans over to the balding man to ask him something. He shrugs and grimaces, saying something that makes both the blond man and the black newcomer guffaw. James gives them an irritated glance, but nods in agreement to something Lisa says to him. They all study the statistics that Dr Cameron is now elucidating: the department, so it seems, treated a total of over six hundred patients last year. The graph shows that patient intake has increased more than tenfold over the past five years, for which Dr Cameron thanks generous donors, as also for the high-tech state-of-the-art lab donated by Princeton Pharmaceuticals (photo montage of shiny equipment that would do a space ship honour). At this point Lisa's disapproval could cut through steel, it's so sharp and honed. _What is her problem with donors_ , he can't help wondering. It seems unlikely that she ran this hospital without resorting to resources donated by wealthy benefactors with an axe of their own to grind. But now even James is looking somewhat thoughtful, while the blond charmer is in agreement with whatever Lisa is muttering to him with pursed lips.

"We're not the _only_ Department of Diagnostics in this country any more, but we're still the leading department with the greatest patient intake, the biggest budget, and above all, the cleverest heads in the country. Who would have thought that we'd ever enjoy more than a sheltered existence in a tiny niche when the department opened up twenty years ago with only a single staff member, its head? When I joined the department about twelve years ago, it had expanded to encompass a breath-taking number of three fellows!"

There's an appreciative laugh as a picture of three young doctors in lab coats is projected behind her, all of them seated around a conference table staring hard at a whiteboard. Dr Cameron is very recognizable, as is the black doctor now sitting at Lisa's table. The third one could be the blond man standing next to Lisa's chair. If it is, then he has lost a lot of his boyish charm in the intervening years, but his present haircut is a definite improvement.

"I'm glad to be able to greet the other two original fellows today: Dr Chase is still at the hospital, one of our leading surgeons, and Dr Foreman, head of Diagnostics at Seattle Metropolitan, has come expressly to celebrate this double anniversary with us." She nods towards Lisa's table, and both men there lift an acknowledging hand to polite applause. "We've still got the whiteboard," Dr Cameron says, earning another laugh from the audience, "because some methods, no matter how antiquated they may seem, don't lose their efficacy over the years. Dr House, unfortunately, can't be with us today. Although he was a very controversial figure in his day, both as a physician and as a private person, the department is deeply indebted to him. Since then ...,"

He ceases to listen, immersed in his own thoughts. House? Rachel's House, the purveyor of the pirate cartoon? Lisa's other ex, whom she won't talk about? _He_ was a physician at PPTH too? Only now does he take a closer look at the figure in the background standing next to the whiteboard, a marker in one gesticulating hand, a cane in the other. No lab coat, a somewhat scruffy appearance, a scowl on a face that has deep lines etched into it ...

There's a crash from the table right below him, but it hardly registers as he tries to get a final glimpse of the man's face before the next picture is projected onto the screen. _His_ face. For there's no doubt about it - that man whose face looks both younger and older than his, unshaven, with a lot more hair than he has now, that man is _he_. House. _Gimp-legged Bad-Egg House_ , his brain sings in a mad refrain.

There's a slight turbulence below, and he becomes aware of faces staring up at him. Something's wrong. Damn, his beer bottle! His enervated fingers have dropped his beer bottle, and it must have fallen directly onto the table beneath him. He knows he's been spotted, although in that lighting it is doubtful that anyone recognises him. He hastily takes a few steps backwards and looks around him, panic beginning to rise in him. The only way down that _he_ knows is via the elevator into the lobby, which isn't really an option. If he roams around long enough, he's bound to find a stairwell, but in view of his total lack of orientation there's no knowing where he'll end up, and he doubts that any of the side entrances are open at this time of day. There's probably some sort of exit to the park deck, but he's damned if he knows how to find it. He opts for the elevator - one or two floors up, and then he'll have to try his luck at finding another exit - but he has tarried for too long. As he presses the 'up' button the doors on one side slide open and Lisa and James come storming out.


	15. The Clouds Burst

Carried forward by her impetus, Lisa pulls up only a few inches in front of him. "What the _fuck_ are you doing here?"

It is only then that a basic truth strikes him: Lisa must have known all along. Obviously. Because she (and James, too) worked at this hospital while he did. So that's what he used to do - he worked at PPTH as a diagnostician. It fits; he can feel the identity cling to him, covering him like a second skin. Not for a moment does he give in to the supposition that the man might be a _doppelganger_ , for the little he knows about himself fits in with what he knows of gimp-legged House: a physician of doubtful repute, the kind of guy Lisa gets attached to, a _shtik drek_.

And Lisa has been aware of his identity all along.

 _You_ _ **knew**_ , his common sense tells him. _There were hints galore that you chose to ignore. Lisa's practiced way of dealing with your disability, her knowledge of your sexual preferences, her dismay when you arrived in the USA, her blind acceptance of your medical authority when you diagnosed that kid in her clinic with anaphylactic shock, her routine way of dealing with your jackassery. She called you 'House' once in Bristol in a drowsy moment on waking up in your arms. She knew that you can play the piano. She even said that you reminded her of someone! You never questioned any of this; you never asked her, nosed around, or showed the slightest suspicion, because you didn't_ _ **want**_ _to know. You preferred to believe that she was interested in you for your own sake, not because of some tenuous, ambiguous connection to your past._

He stares down at her, his brain barely grasping what this means, but finally his tongue kicks in again. "Why the fuck didn't you tell me?"

She doesn't pretend not to know what he's talking about, nor does she show any sign of guilt. "Trust me, you didn't want to know."

"And that's your call to make, to decide what _I_ want to know?"

James opens his mouth for the first time. "It's the call _you_ made when you opted for a procedure that would erase your memory, covering your tracks beforehand to ensure you'd never find out who you are."

What James says confirms his suspicions, but he's not about to show either of them that he's aware that he caused his own misery.

The second elevator opens its doors with a ping, disclosing the three men who'd been sitting or standing around Lisa's table. The blond guy, Chase, says, "It _is_ House!" upon which Lisa swings round to him, hissing, "Shush! You don't need to announce it to the whole goddamn hospital!"

The group starts towards him, surprise, doubt and warmth in differing degrees on their several faces. He gives them a quelling frown, for other than the sparse information he gleaned from Dr Cameron's presentation he has no idea who they are, and he does not want to be involved in PDAs with total strangers. But he needn't have worried; Lisa, rolling her eyes, moves towards the cluster now grouped in front of the elevator, opening her arms in an all-embracing shooing movement.

"I'm sure this is very exciting for all of you, but could we move this party somewhere else before the whole gala is moved up here to the balcony?" she says in a low, penetrating whisper, herding everyone into the room with the supplies. Two of Rick's student-workers are sorting empty bottles into crates; she points a thumb towards the door, and after one glance at her they straighten and scoot out of there double quick.

"How do we get him out of here?" James suddenly asks. He's very pale, supporting himself against the wall with one hand while massaging the bridge of his nose with the other.

Everyone looks at Lisa, who takes a deep breath. "I haven't got that far yet! I'm still processing his appearance here. At the moment all my efforts are concentrated on keeping his presence a secret. Or does anyone think we should take him down into the lobby and say, 'Look who we have here!' ?"

There's a general shaking of heads

"You ... know about him?" the neurologist, Foreman, asks, raising an eyebrow delicately at Lisa.

"No thanks to any of you!" Lisa snaps.

"We can take him to the ER, and out through the entrance over there," Chase suggests. He's got a bit of an accent - Down Under, or something like that. "It's probably the only one that's open, other than the lobby entrance."

He's beginning to have a very bad feeling about all this. His first impulse - getting out before anyone recognises him - was based purely on a gut feeling that being among people who all know him, but whom _he_ doesn't remember at all could end in a PR disaster, but the longer he observes the group around him the more the certitude overcomes him that no one at this hospital is preparing to slaughter the fattened calf for him. This small clique comprising his former fellows may (or may not) have benevolent feelings towards him, but they seem utterly convinced that no one else does. Nonetheless, he has no desire to be hustled out of here, possibly with a hood over his head, before he has a chance to assess what exactly his connection to each and every person in this interesting bunch is. James has collapsed on the floor with his head back against the wall, breathing heavily. The dwarf is looking confused; everyone else is involved in a heated discussion on how to get him out by the shortest, least frequented route.

He sits down on a crate, pulls a bottle of beer from another one and knocks the cap off against the edge of the crate.

"Actually, I'm on duty till midnight," he says with deceptive calm. "Can't really leave yet, I'm afraid." He takes a long swig. "Why don't we get to know each other? I'm Peter Barnes - call me Pete."

Instantaneous, deadly silence. Four pairs of eyes bore into him - Lisa has closed her eyes and is probably counting to one hundred in her head. James is doing some sort of karate chop with his hands while trying to overcome what must be a bad stutter, for though his lips are moving, no words have as yet passed them. Mini Cyrano de Bergerac is looking totally confused, while the Australian is mostly astonished, though not in a bad way. Only Dr Foreman seems pleased - one might even say, paternally proud.

Finally the vertically challenged fellow says, "I'm probably getting rusty, but I have no idea what game we're playing. Do I get to be Dirk Nowitzky?"

"You get to witness a unique medical phenomenon," Foreman says with undeniable pride. "Total retrograde amnesia of the episodic memory induced by a planned procedure."

"This," says the wannabe basketball player, "is - interesting. How did you do it?" He looks at him, Pete, not at the previous speaker, which means that he, too, assumes that the victim of the procedure was also the perpetrator. Nor does he ask the question that comes to mind first, long before the 'how' of the procedure: he doesn't ask for a reason why. That means that to him the reason is clear.

"Thing about retrograde amnesia," Pete says drily, "is that one can't remember what one did."

The black guy steps forward. "Eric Foreman," he says. "An ex-fellow. I did the neurological procedure on you that erased your memory: electrical impulses targeted at the hippocampus. We started off with ...,"

"Please!" James interrupts. "Can we get back to the matter on hand?"

Pete takes a swig from the bottle, ignoring the hand Foreman is extending, and looks over at the short one with the long nose.

"That's Taub, also an ex-fellow of yours. He still works here," Foreman supplies.

"And his role in frying my brain?"

"None," Taub says. "The big boys wouldn't let me play with them." He tips his head at Foreman and Chase.

"You were on double paternity leave," Foreman points out.

"What about you, Dr Chase?" Pete asks the Australian.

If he's astonished at being identified correctly, he doesn't show it. "I _chose_ not to play. Congratulations: so the EST worked as you intended. You did most of the planning yourself, so don't let Foreman take all the credit."

"We did the planning together, and _I_ carried it out," Foreman interjects, giving Chase a very dirty look.

"Easy to say, since the main witness is suffering from amnesia," Chase retorts.

"Boys!" Lisa admonishes. "This is not the time to mess with each other's heads."

He sees her point, but all this is immensely interesting. "You were Watson?" he asks Foreman, remembering the signatures on the ambulance recording form.

Foreman smiles appreciatively. "No. I was Lestrade. Wilson was Watson."

James Wilson was involved in Operation _Tabula Rasa_? That's - unexpected.

He looks at him. James - maybe he should start thinking of him as Wilson, since he seems to have been on last name terms with everyone here - is sitting with angled legs, his face in his hands. He's coming apart, shaking slightly, but no one has noticed, not even Lisa, because he, Pete, is the focus of all attention. If he were a nice guy, he'd point out James's state to someone, that sheen of sweat on his forehead, the tremor in his hands. But at present he doesn't feel charitable towards a person who could have saved him a lot of time and effort simply by saying, 'Oh, hello, House!' a few weeks ago.

"What about our Irene Adler?" He looks at Lisa directly for the first time. She's pale, collected, withdrawn, standing next to the closed door of the meeting room, keeping almost the entire length of the room between herself and him. An odd place to be, considering the impact of tonight's revelation on him. One would think that as his girlfriend she'd be at his side to offer support and croon empty platitudes of comfort. Okay, she isn't one for platitudes or comfort, but he's pretty sure that she's got the support routine on her fingertips. There are two explanations that he can think of on the spur of the moment for her uncharacteristic behaviour: one is that unmasking his identity impacts James even more than it does him, so that her concern is now entirely directed at James. It has undoubtedly had a spectacular effect on James - is it possible that he, Pete, was the guy because of whom James drove his car into Lisa's house? Was his leg injury, the one Rachel remembers, a direct result of the attack, thus leading to the amputation? If so, does James now fear retribution?

The theory has two major loopholes: first, Lisa may show little inclination to do the 'concerned girlfriend' act for him, but she's showing even less concern for James. He doesn't even seem to register on her radar. Second, why on earth should he, Pete, have consented to a risky EST in order to erase the memory of James's misdeeds? Supplanting James in Lisa's bed may not have been the act of a bro, but it's certainly no reason for excessive self-flagellation.

The second explanation is that Lisa had some part in the brain procedure that she's now ashamed of.

Taub says drily, "If she'd been a part of this, you'd have ended with a lobectomy."

So much for that theory.

Lisa stiffens immediately. "He doesn't remember any of _that_ ," she says with the hint of a warning in her voice. The others look over at her, and again he can see differing levels of comprehension flitting across their faces. It irritates him no end, this memory apartheid that shuts him off from a knowledge base that the others can access.

"What don't I remember?" he promptly asks, his head tipped and his brows furrowed.

Foreman and Chase exchange glances. "The ER exit seems a really great idea," Chase says, holding out a hand to pull him up. "Dr Cuddy's right about taking this discussion outside. Your popularity wasn't at its zenith when you left the hospital."

Ignoring Chase's hand, he rises and walks over to Lisa, looking down at her as she stands leaned against the wall next to the door. She looks up at him without flinching, but in her glance there's no shame or embarrassment. Instead, there's sadness. She blinks away the tears in her eyes and says brusquely, "Shall we go?" Straightening, she breaks away from his penetrating stare, and turns towards the door.

Tears are not good news. She isn't the type to let fountains of joy spill from her eyes, so his discovery of his true identity must bear some grain of knowledge in it that affects her directly. The third theory that accounts for her standoffishness is one he hasn't quite worked out yet, but it has something to do with _Bad Egg_ House.

"I'm the House Rachel remembers," he states.

"Yes," she admits.

"We were together - before this?" he asks just to make sure, gesturing between her and himself.

"Can we talk about this outside?" she says.

"You guys are ... together? Now?" Foreman asks. 'Disbelief' doesn't even begin to cover his reaction.

"Is that so surprising?" Taub asks. (Both Foreman and Chase stare at Taub aghast, so apparently it is.) "If people weren't stupid about love, mankind would have died out long ago," he explains.

"Well, _you_ should know," Chase mutters, but he doesn't look convinced.

What is so tainted about him that the idea of his being Lisa's boyfriend is more reprehensible than Lisa still caring about the man who drove his car through her house?

He tries to disconnect himself from the scene and observe it from a distance: the ex-fellows, who seem to like him on some level, but who consider him besmirched on some other level; Lisa, who is teary-eyed because whatever he _was_ affects her relationship with who he is now; James, whose decomposition in his unobserved corner is proceeding at a rapid rate.

And then he sees his mistake. It's a bit like an Escher picture, where people walk up and down winding staircases that never seem to end, but when one looks closely one can see where the artist inverted the perspective in order to connect beginning and end. Because that's what he did when he read about the car crash that wrecked Lisa's home: he took the end of the staircase labelled 'ex-employee with addiction issues' and attached it to James, which warped the perspective sufficiently to make the staircase he's walking down connect to its own beginning again. But now that he looks at the picture from a distance he sees where that end of the staircase really belongs, and when one fits it there the staircase just goes one way, ending in a deep pit.

He takes hold of Lisa's arm as she makes to go out the door and stops her. " _I_ drove the car, didn't I?" he says so only she can hear.

She swallows, her Adam's apple bobbing, and then she nods. "Pete!" she says, placing a beseeching hand on his arm.

He clamps his lips together, straightening to put some distance between them. "Let's go," he says, echoing her words from earlier while he pushes past her, opening the door. His moody exit is ruined somewhat when he hesitates with no idea which way to go.

"Left," Lisa says behind him. Chase overtakes him and leads on. He limps behind him for all he's worth, preferring not to have to face Lisa and look in her face, his brain working madly to erase facts that had seemed chiselled in granite and replace them with the new ones he just learned, even as his eyes take in his surroundings: the ICU on one side, eerily quiet, its staff looking up in surprise as their group passes; three OTs beyond a door inscribed in large red letters 'Surgery staff only beyond this point' that Chase opens with his ID; a stairwell in functional concrete, at the door of which Chase stops, giving him a questioning look.

"How good are you with stairs?" he asks.

"Fine, if you're not expecting an old cripple to sprint down them."

Chase nods and leads the way down. At the bottom they exit the stairwell and turn left, only to halt in front of another large double door, the ER this time. Chase turns round to look at the others.

"It'll still be busy in there, and he's too large to hide," he says. "Get a wheelchair or something. Then he won't be so tall and we can surround him." The others nod.

"Is Wilson bringing the car round?" Taub asks. It is only then that the others notice what he, Pete, has been aware of all along: Wilson's absence. Wilson never left the meeting room with its stash of champagne and wine.

"He can't," Lisa answers. "I've got the key." Her face, already tense and tired, puckers up further as comprehension dawns. "Oh, crap!" she says, and then she sprints back towards the stairs as fast as her heels will allow her. "Get him out!" she instructs in parting. "Wilson and I will meet you in the car park."

"Wheelchair," Chase says.

Foreman holds out his fist. The other two roll their eyes, but a moment later all three wave their arms three times before opening their fists. It's some form of 'Rock Paper Scissors' that Chase promptly loses, so he disappears into the ER. There's an awkward silence, with the two remaining ex-fellows mustering him intently.

"Why?" he asks Foreman.

"Look, I don't think ...,"

He says sharply, "You may find it difficult to prove that I consented to the procedure, in which case you're risking your licence and possibly your freedom should I sue you, so again: why?"

"I made sure to get your written statement that you were apprised of the risks of the procedure and not only approved of it but expressly requested it, before I started planning it," Foreman responds. "So, no, you're not suing me. Or Wilson, for that matter."

"This is stupid," Taub says to Foreman. "Since when are you bothered about rubbing his past in his face?"

"Cuddy's not going to like it," Foreman argues.

"Too bad," Taub returns. "He's going to poke and pry in our lives till he finds out anyway, and I, for one, would prefer to keep him out of mine." He turns to Pete. "You were a vicodin addict who'd been dumped by his girlfriend. You lost your leg trying to kill her and your medical licence got trashed too, in the aftermath. You barely escaped a prison sentence and you had no future here whatsoever. Cu- ... The hospital didn't even have to ask for you to be blackballed: with your reputation, a record of domestic violence and no licence, you were professionally dead."

"But I didn't actually kill anyone?" he asks, just to be sure. "There's no open warrant for my arrest?"

"No and no," Foreman replies. "It was sheer luck that no one got killed. And you were acquitted thanks to Wilson's testimony; he claimed that you were trying to commit suicide, not murder."

"Then why the hell did I risk turning myself into a vegetable if I was in no acute danger of spending the rest of my life in prison?" he asks Foreman, the person who must know the most about his state of mind prior to the brainwashing.

Foreman shrugs. "Oblivion? Atonement by risking what is most valuable to you? You weren't exactly chatty Cathy when we discussed the procedure."

"So you messed with my brain on the off-chance that this was what I'd want in the long run, despite there being _no_ concrete reason for such a radical measure?" He can't believe that this jerk used him as a guinea pig to test his theories on memory, cashing in on what had probably been a short period of deluded despair.

"House, you've messed with your brain _and_ with your life for far less reason before this! You're accusing me of satisfying my professional curiosity at your expense. Maybe I'd have done that, but Wilson would never have aided and abetted any such scheme if he hadn't considered it beneficial to you."

Hearing himself referred to as 'House' is disconcerting; getting his brain around the fact that he's the kind of man who'd stalk an ex-girlfriend and try to harm her - the role he'd assigned to James Wilson - is _more_ than disconcerting. When Chase comes back with a wheelchair, he's too immersed in his thoughts to put up as much as a token protest; he slumps down in it and allows himself to be pushed out through the ER into the parking lot.

Is what he has discovered (purely by accident, but that's neither here nor there) such a surprise? It isn't as though he'd realistically reckoned with the revelation that he'd been a model citizen, a loving son or husband, a grace to his profession, or a pillar of the church. He'd been reckoning with some criminal activity that would suffice to get him put into prison for an indefinite period of time. Now it turns out that although he may not have been a particularly well-loved physician, he'd been well on the legal side of the profession, and although his domestic activities won't bear a close scrutiny, there's no blood on his hands. Perversely, he isn't relieved in any way: murdering some stranger in cold blood somehow appears a lot more acceptable than nearly murdering Lisa in heated anger.

And that is precisely the problem. Regardless of what crime he was expecting to discover in his past, he'd been banking on its victims being cardboard cut-outs, blanks, no one to whom he'd have any sort of emotional connection in his present life, no matter how well he'd known them in his past one. In fact, _this_ had been his only unwavering conviction throughout the quest for his past: that while the nature of his crime may have been abhorrent, its victims would never be more than shadowy figures to his present consciousness. He'd feel guilt and remorse on some level, but they would be abstract, not concrete memories in which his victims' fear or their suffering could come back to haunt him. He'd played out scenarios in his mind in which he ran into someone who used to know him, but while he'd pictured reactions ranging from angry or disbelieving surprise to delight - okay, the latter may have been wishful thinking - , he'd never envisaged an outcome where a person he'd come to know and trust turned out to be a victim of his misdeeds, a near-casualty of his rampant rage, her daughter crippled as a direct result of his destructive energy.

What Lisa sees in him that induces her to close her eyes to his past beats him, anyway. As long as he'd thought it was Wilson she was being a moron about, he'd been contemptuous of her idiocy, but he'd understood how she could delude herself: Wilson is good-looking, charming, attentive to Rachel, helpful, and so smooth that one can't help believing that he couldn't possibly have put a car through a house on purpose. (And now it turns out that he didn't, so appearances don't always deceive. He's even willing to admit that his refusal to believe the suicide theory with regard to Wilson was mostly based on a desire to think the worst of the man he believed to be Lisa's ex.)

He, on the other hand, is abrasive, a lousy dad, and a dick. He's exactly the kind of person one would consider capable of committing deeds of senseless, psychopathic violence. And whatever other salubrious effects EST to the hippocampus may have, altering a person's personality isn't among them. Nothing has changed; he's still the violent bastard he was four years ago, and if Lisa thinks that the years in England have taken off his edge and domesticated him, then she's a bigger fool than she looks. He hasn't a clue what turned him into a raging bull four years ago - he can't imagine feeling intensely enough about a woman to do more than brood and drink - but he's reasonably sure that whatever the problem was, amputating his leg and doing a 'format C:' on his memory won't have cured the basic problem.

Chase is pushing the wheelchair over the parking lot in a desultory fashion. "Any idea what car Cuddy drives?" he asks no one in particular.

"Stop here!" he orders, and Chase obliges, surprised, in front of his beaten-up Ford. He practically skips out of the wheelchair pulling out his car keys, but on second thought he abandons the idea of a quick escape. His three ex-fellows are still too surprised at his return to guard their tongues, but give them time to adjust and they will only say what suits their own agenda. "What happened between Cuddy and me, other than that I drove a car into her house?" he asks, deliberately using the name everyone here seems to use in order to lower their guard.

They look at each other. "I think you should talk to Cuddy about that," Foreman says. Okay, that's a guy who _always_ guards his tongue. He's going to have to get them each by himself if he wants to milk them. Whatever it was, it must have been quite something, if the _trio infernale_ would prefer Lisa to tell the story.

"What about Wilson?" he tries again. He still can't quite gauge his role in the whole affair.

"What about him?" Chase asks. "You've noticed his little problem, haven't you?" There's a hint of an accusation there, a 'you should have stopped him when he helped himself to the booze'. Well, he isn't Wilson's keeper.

"That's not what House means," Taub says. He turns to Pete. "You were best friends. I doubt you are now."

Best friends, he and that smooth-talking mother-in-law's dream? He hadn't thought that the night would bring further amazing revelations, but his chin literally drops for a moment at that one. But then, there's more to Wilson than the polite, seamless surface - a hard, granite core that he sensed at their first meeting. His first mistake lay in attributing to Wilson the role of addict-turned-ballistic, his second in assuming that Wilson was involved in his re-invention as Pete Barnes for Lisa's sake as _her_ friend. This version makes more sense: Lisa, apparently, wasn't involved, which explains her confusion on first meeting him in Bristol, while Wilson ...

"What was his role in the EST?" he asks Foreman.

"I was responsible for the procedure as such; he arranged the logistics: a private clinic in England, a surgeon and assisting staff, your papers for afterwards."

Lisa appears in the brightly lit sliding doors, her arm hooked into the crook of Wilson's elbow, doing her best to make their exit look as though it was taking place in mutual agreement and perfect amicability. Wilson is looking picturesquely Byronesque with his sleeves rolled up, his tie loosened and askew and his hair fashionably messed up. Twenty years younger, and he'd be breaking teen hearts. Unfortunately, he is spoiling the picture somewhat by singing jovially and tugging Lisa backwards at regular intervals. How she manages to navigate the dark parking lot in those heels while propelling Wilson onwards is one of those mysterious feats of sheer will power that can't fail to impress him. When they reach the group in the parking lot Wilson forcibly detaches himself from Lisa, weaving to join them with a goofy smile plastered all over his face. Lisa rolls her eyes, but uses the opportunity to unlock her Volvo station wagon and open the passenger door. Then she skips back to Wilson and jerks him towards the car.

"In!" she orders.

"You're no fun," Wilson grouses.

"Nolan won't be either, when I get him back to you. You have craptastic timing, relapsing tonight of all nights!"

Pete can't help himself. "Yeah, really inconsiderate of Wilson, not to fit his relapses into your schedule."

He must have touched some raw spot there, because Lisa stiffens and bites her lip, while the three fellows give him the same sort of awed stare with which they favoured his announcement that he was Pete Barnes. Only Wilson remains unaffected, raising a hand and crowing, "High five!"

"You're sure he's got amnesia?" Taub says to no one in particular.

"Yes," Lisa snaps. "He has the unique gift of being a jerk without even knowing it!" She looks around challengingly. "Are you guys going to amuse yourselves at my expense or are you going to help me get Wilson into this car?"

"I'm-m spending the night wi-with Alla-Allison," Wilson articulates indistinctly, pointing in the general direction of the hospital. From there, unnoticed till now, the woman in red is approaching the group.

"God _dam_ mit!" Lisa mutters.

Cameron, Allison, or whatever she's generally called, makes straight for Wilson and Lisa. Pete draws back into the semi-dark, interested by Lisa's present dismay and her earlier disapproval of Cameron's presentation.

"Wasn't I supposed to bring James back to Mayfield tomorrow?" Cameron asks.

"'James'?" Chase says in a mocking tone. Cameron ignores him.

"'S what I sh - said," Wilson pronounces triumphantly.

Cameron draws closer to him, her face falling. "Oh, no!" she says, placing a hand on his arm. It's the first gesture of kindness to Wilson shown by anyone since Lisa dragged him out onto the parking lot; everyone else has been indifferent (Foreman) or enervated (Lisa). "I thought you were keeping an eye on him," she says to Lisa accusingly.

Pete again can't help himself. "She got distracted," he says from where he's leaning against the trunk of his car, "by another bad boy."

Cameron pivots around at the sound of his voice. Then she steps up closer, mustering his face keenly. "House!"

She is not delighted to see him, he notes. The same can't be said for him. Up close, she's absolutely smashing in that dress, which emphasises all the right places and gives tantalising glimpses of well-rounded flesh at the cleavage and down her back. He whistles appreciatively (which earns him an eye-roll from most of the others present) and says, "So I'm told, Dr Cameron."

She steps right up to him, invading his personal space, her face set. She's a younger, less tense version of Lisa, but she matches her in determination and in relentlessness. "I can't believe that you've got the impudence to return here, of all places. You're not welcome here, House!"

He's slightly shocked at such unalloyed animosity, but it also challenges him. "What happened to 'regretting my absence today' and 'the hospital owing me a lot'? Tsk, tsk, such hypocrisy in one so young!"

Her eyes flash. "Your absence is regrettable insofar as you caused a _need_ for it, and whatever debt the hospital owed you has been paid back with interest." She swings around to face the others. "Are you guys okay with him being here?" she asks indignantly.

Chase shrugs. Taub does a very good job of merging with the background. Foreman raises his hands defensively, saying, "I'm just a guest myself."

"I should have known better than to expect any of you to show the slightest moral fibre," Cameron says from between pressed lips, "but I would have thought that four years without him should be sufficient to open your eyes to your own responsibility; House could never have done what he did if you hadn't spent years supporting his delusion that he owes no one, least of all himself, any sort of moral justification for what he does."

"Are you blaming _us_ ...," Chase ventures.

"I damn well am!" Cameron cuts in.

"Why not Wilson?"

"Enough!" Lisa barks. "House didn't want you to fix him - get over it!" she says to Cameron. "And you," she says to Chase, "stop messing with everyone! It's way past old."

Cameron now musters Lisa. "You don't care that he's here, drawing them all back in again?"

Lisa shakes her head tiredly. "He may be back, but he isn't drawing anyone into anything. He can't even remember who he is or what he did. Amnesia."

"How - convenient," Cameron says.

"You don't believe her," he states, inexplicably hurt.

Cameron is back in his personal space, looking him straight in the eye. "Oh, I do," she says. "Because that is _totally_ you. Always ready to rub other people's weaknesses under their noses, but unable to look your own in the eye."


	16. Flies and Spiders

Unified in action, if not in opinion, Cameron and Lisa finally manage to bundle Wilson into the car. Once that is achieved, Cameron hurries back to the hospital to return to her representational duties, while Lisa swings her car keys, looking over at him doubtfully.

"I suppose you aren't coming along," she says.

He avoids her eyes. "Nope. Got my car here."

She nods, looking down herself now. After a moment she asks, "Where are you staying?"

"Don't know yet. I'll find something."

"Will I see you?"

He doesn't answer. Her shoulders slump as she turns away to slide into the driver's seat. He watches the car's tail lights recede, and then he turns back to the three waiting physicians.

"Know any bars around here?" he enquires.

They all perk up visibly - he isn't the only one, apparently, who found Cameron's performance dampening. A short consultation, then Foreman and Taub walk off to Foreman's car while Chase comes with him to direct him to the bar of their choice.

"I was going to get plastered and take a taxi home, anyway," is Chase's reply to his query how the younger man will get back to his own car.

He can't help approving of their taste; the place Chase directs him to is well-frequented, but the music is muted and there are enough secluded booths to ensure their privacy. Vexingly, putting that privacy to productive use proves to be somewhat of a challenge. He's too wily to start off with topics that they'd rather not talk about - his inglorious exit from PPTH, his relationship (past and present) with Lisa - but they don't seem to know much about him that isn't riddled with all sorts of landmines. His very first question, about his family - can there be anything more innocent or less controversial? - not only draws pretty much a blank, but also opens the curtain to the key note of their joint performance: given the most straightforward question, his three former fellows invariably voice three different and mutually exclusive opinions.

They all agree that his father died eight or nine years ago and that his mother was still alive at that point, but they can't agree on whether she's still alive or whether he has any siblings. There's also no common denominator in their opinion on his relationship with his parents.

"You hated them," Taub says. "Cuddy and Wilson had to drug you to get you to your father's funeral."

"He didn't hate his mother," Foreman promptly contradicts. "It was his _father_ he had an issue with."

"Evading the funeral punished his mother more than his father, who couldn't have cared less, being dead already," Taub asserts, "ergo, he must have hated his mother too."

"It's more complicated than that," Chase interposes. "Just because he didn't want to attend the funeral, doesn't mean he hated either of them." Everyone stares at him. "You can have lots of reasons for wanting to avoid your parents," he adds defensively.

That's not a sentiment he's inclined to disagree with, but hearing it from Chase is unexpected.

"What happened to his wife?" Taub suddenly asks the others.

"What wife?" he asks, his voice hoarse with dread.

"You got married just before, ah, the accident," Taub explains, "to a very pretty and accomplished hooker. And you guys don't need to kick me under the table."

For once he's speechless.

There's a clarification of sorts on this - it seems the lady in question was a green-card aspirant, not a hooker -, but the nature of her services to him are a point of some controversy (unlike the quality of her knishes), and there's a certain amount of reluctance to talk about his reasons for entering the state of matrimony with someone who was apparently a total stranger.

"You were stoned," Chase offers, as though this exculpates him.

"Why was I stoned?"

"Why does the sun rise?" Taub mutters.

"Wilson will know what happened to her," Foreman says, diverting the conversation away from this pitfall, back to the original question. "He's bound to have taken care of it."

There's general agreement on that, and it isn't the first time that Wilson's name has fallen as an unfailing source of information. The question of his family, he has been told, should be referred to Wilson, as should anything pertaining to his employment prior to PPTH. Despite their appalling ignorance, he manages to piece together a picture of his past: an unhappy childhood moving from base to base; his pre-med and med school careers extremely chequered and featuring at least two expulsions (one from Johns Hopkins); his rising reputation inversely proportional to his ability to keep down a job; the infarction ...

"Infarction? Not an accident?" For some reason he'd assumed that the amputation was the result of an accident, not a medical condition.

His former employees gladly latch onto that, and soon the group is immersed in the medical details of infarction, muscle death, debridement surgery versus amputation, etc. It's a lot of information, even for his restless brain, and he's beginning to wonder whether he has the time line of his life down right.

"I was crippled for years before the amputation," he summarises.

"Yeah, and you got addicted to the Vicodin you were using as pain management," Chase elucidates.

"Wait - I didn't get expelled from school or lose my other jobs because of my addiction?"

They look at each other. "Not that we know of," Foreman says. "You were _that_ annoying even without the drugs."

"No, he wasn't," Taub, who so far hasn't given the impression that he's his greatest fan, counters. "The years he was sober, he was fairly mellow."

"There could have been addiction issues before the infarction," Foreman concedes. "We wouldn't know."

"Wilson would," Chase supplies. "You'll have to ...,"

"… ask Wilson," he grumbles. "Yes, I've figured that."

They talk about his detoxes next - what the hell was his life like if his former employees consider his addiction to be 'neutral' information? There were two major ones, one out-of-state and one at PPTH under Wilson's supervision (yes, the ubiquitous Wilson again) just before the EST. Chase mentions two more, one during the 'Tritter Affair', a period during which he fell foul of the law ("You forged prescriptions and insulted a police officer - addicts are stupid," Foreman remarks with dry satisfaction), but only stayed clean for long enough to escape being sentenced; and another 'informal' one of his own accord that only Chase accepts as a detox. ("I'm not counting a clinic hour bet as a medical detox!" Foreman objects.)

"If I was such a liability, why'd the hospital keep me?"

There's rare agreement on this: he was a brilliant diagnostician.

Chase murmurs that he learned a lot from him and Taub chimes in to say that his time under House was the most challenging of his life. "Not saying that everything you did was okay, but you knew how to get results," even Foreman can't help admitting.

"Cameron doesn't?" he asks, remembering her statistics and the growth of the department under her aegis. He doesn't want (or need) a confirmation of his superiority - the presence of his three former fellows here with him instead of at the gala dinner with the guests of honour speaks its own language; he needs to figure out where he, in his present licence-less state, can fit in again.

"Quantity does not make quality," Foreman proses. "My department only has four fellows, but we ..."

"You're just pissed because Seattle Metropolitan won't give you the funds that Cameron commands," Chase needles him. It's become predictable; equally predictable is that Foreman never learns, rising to every jab Chase administers.

"Cameron _treats_ five hundred a year, she doesn't _diagnose_ them all," Foreman promptly re-joins. "I know the statistics - under House we barely lost five per cent of our patients; she's losing between twenty and thirty per cent, and among the ones she saves are any number that would never have made it to Diagnostics in our day because anyone could have diagnosed them. Cameron has turned Diagnostics into a big shop that sells everything from diagnoses of rare genetic conditions to the common cold, but she's lost sight of its main product." Interestingly, Foreman doesn't mention the success rate of his present department.

"Big shop has its upsides," Taub says. "More fellows and residents means regular working hours, time for your family and for the second job that you need to support that family." The others laugh; he shrugs.

"I doubt the patients see it that way; part of Cameron's problem is that there's too little continuity in patient assessment and treatment, with a different fellow on duty every eight hours," Chase says.

It takes two more scotches before they are mellowed enough to divulge sensitive information. As usual, they can't agree on much, but the more wasted they get, the fewer their inhibitions, so although the facts remain somewhat foggy, he gets a pretty good picture of the horror of those last disastrous years at PPTH.

"Workplace relationships are never a good idea, especially when they connect different levels of hierarchy," Foreman pontificates. "You guys were bound to combust, what with you challenging her authority. That was fine as long as she had no personal stake in you, but the moment the border line between professional and personal relationship becomes fuzzy, ..."

"Are we still talking about House and Cuddy, or about yourself?" Chase asks. "Cuddy's problem wasn't House challenging her authority, it was the unrealistic expectations she had. She couldn't accept him the way he was; she wanted to press his personality into the mould she'd made for it."

"We're still talking about Cuddy here, right?" Taub asks drily.

"Why don't _you_ explain why two people who have years of shared history and love each other can't make it last for as much as a year!" Chase responds angrily.

"Oh, definitely still about House and Cuddy," Foreman mutters.

"Sometimes love isn't enough," Taub muses. "The more you love each other, the more you can hurt each other, until it's besht - best for both sides to part. Sometimes it's better to leave the one you love, instead of hurting them even more."

"Yeah, seems to have worked just great for me," he interjects. For the most part, he's been sitting quietly, just throwing in a question or two to keep the flow of intel going, but considering what he knows of the calamitous end of his relationship with Lisa, Taub's philosophy seems to be limited in its validity.

"You were lucky she dumped you, even if you didn't see it that way," Foreman opines, leaning back and folding his hands behind his head. "You were a crappy doctor while you were dating her."

"You were even crappier when she stopped dating you," Chase says.

"Why'd she end it?" he asks casually, but hammered though his fellows are, they are not fooled. They look at each other in silence, sober for a brief moment.

"Patient confidentiality," Chase finally says.

"What, do I have to ask Wilson?"

"Asking Wilson about Cuddy would be like asking my ex-wife about my girl-friend," Taub says with a hiccup that turns into a giggle.

"Good point," Chase agrees.

"Were Wilson and I ...?" he rolls his hand in a suggestive gesture, unable to keep the surprise he feels off his face. There's some dismay too - he's never really thought about it, but he sees himself as straight.

"Much worse," Chase says. "Best friends."

"I've been told that already," he growls.

"Forget it," Foreman advises Chase. "That kind of parasitic relationship is difficult to describe." He turns to Pete. "Wilson would tell _you_ that you messed it up by not being there when she needed you, and he'd tell _her_ that she messed it up for giving up on you because of one vicodin. And he'd probably be right on both counts."

"Probably not," Taub says. "You _were_ there when she needed you. You were stoned, but that's what addicts do - they relapse."

"Well, that was kinda Cuddy's point, wasn't it," Chase says, "that House would always relapse when he was needed? You definitely went out of your way afterwards to prove her right!"

He's got the general gist of the matter: he'd failed to make the mark during some sort of crisis, he'd relapsed, and then he'd got dumped. The fellows, their tongues loosened by the alcohol he's been plying them with, regale him with tales of the atrocities he'd committed in the wake of his relapse, their narrative soon widening to include the crapassery he had indulged in before those days. As they relive those days, joking and laughing at their memories, he can feel a blanket of gloom settling over him. He'd had a good life, a job that didn't suck altogether, a nation-wide reputation, and he'd managed to fuck all that up completely and utterly. It doesn't really matter whether one considers his downward spiral to begin with the infarction and his subsequent addiction, his decision to start a relationship with his boss or his violent reaction to the end of that relationship: every time there had been a fork in the road along which he'd travelled, he'd chosen the wrong path with self-destructive determination.

He looks at their flushed, jovial faces, and for the life of him he can't figure out what they find hilarious about sticking a knife into an outlet in order to find out whether there's an afterlife, a stunt that wouldn't have proved anything even if he'd seen the Lord on his throne surrounded by hosts of angels - other than that electric current alters the way the brain processes neurological signals. How stoned does one have to be in order to risk one's life examining so-called paranormal phenomena instead of following the dictates of logic and reason? It's even worse than the rat poison fiasco - he can sort of see the logic behind that attempt to regain the mobility and the freedom from pain that had been eluding him for years, even if his method didn't fulfil any scientific criteria.

For the first time in these past three-and-then-some years he concedes that he may have done himself a favour by re-formatting his hard disk; under all the brilliance and uniqueness that their joint narratives depict, there's the on-going theme of a deeply troubled and miserable soul. Undoubtedly he still isn't exactly easy maintenance or the essence of cheer, but he wouldn't describe himself as a suicide bomber aiming at taking as many people as possible down with him. Because that's the metaphor that comes to mind when one hears his fellows' _Merry Tales of Gregory House MD_.

"I'll leave you guys to it," he says suddenly, pushing his chair back. Chase and Taub, flushed, barely notice his departure, but Foreman, the soberest of the three, rises to accompany him to the door of the bar.

Outside, Foreman stops and says, "I'm returning to Seattle tomorrow - today -, but we should stay in contact. I may be able to get you in as a consultant to my department."

A sudden rush of adrenaline momentarily lifts the gloom that has settled on him, and he lets a slight smile escape to twitch on his lips. He nods, plucking the card that Foreman extracts from his wallet from Foreman's fingers and walking over to his car without another word.

"Goodnight, House!" Foreman calls.

He slams the door and lifts a hand in acknowledgement as he pulls away from the curb.

* * *

He'd really like to talk to Wilson, but after what happened in Princeton there's no hope that Mayfield will let him anywhere near the man during the next weeks. So he spends the next few days poring over court records and newspaper archives, his findings confirming the picture his fellows painted of his previous life. Peeking at his past through the keyhole of strangers' reports is frustrating in that it offers him only the barest of glimpses of what happened - even his fellows' drunken tales gave him a better whiff of the essence of Greg House than these sterile reports. There's stuff that he seriously doesn't understand. Yes, he gets what made him sabotage the last trial, the one for attempted manslaughter. If anything surprises him it's that he didn't plead guilty and spare the prosecution the bother of trying to get him convicted.

It's the other trial that's harder to comprehend. He'd risked getting sentenced to a long stint in jail, where detox is painful and drawn out, in order to avoid a detox in an institution of his choice? If Lisa hadn't stepped up at the last moment ... Then there are the charges against him: theft of a prescription pad, prescription forgery, theft of patient medication; all palpably true and in their entirety numbingly sordid - more than enough to have justified losing his licence, if not his freedom.

_You knew you were an addict; what the hell did you expect?_ the voice of reason enquires.

Whatever he expected, it wasn't this. Some inner romantic in him must have believed that his addiction had 'merely' moved his medical career from legal institutions of medicine to semi-legal ones. Personally, he doesn't care how the persons he treated earned their living; his job was to save lives, not to judge them. And if he got paid in kind rather than in cash, in the form of intoxicating substances, that wouldn't cause his inner moral compass to swerve or waver in the least. But forgery and theft from hospital bedsides to maintain his addiction is petty and mediocre; it has neither glamour nor moral justification.

It isn't that he has an innate respect for the concept of private property (unless it's his own) or that he's above a bit of 'borrowing' when the occasion demands it; there is, however, a world of difference between taking something because the opportunity presents itself and taking it because one's inner compulsions won't permit abstinence. It's a question of control, and if there's something lacking in the life of Gregory House, it's control over himself, whether it's his addiction (addictions?) or his reaction to frustration.

It's when he gets an email from Foreman in the middle of the week that his subliminal unease with his present situation crystallises into something tangible. Foreman's mail is short and to the point: his dean would be only too happy to approve of additional funding for consultations, but only if the consulting physician was the famous Gregory House. He should change his identity back to Gregory House _asap_ , and then get back in contact with Foreman, who already has a few cases lined up for him.

This doesn't really come as a surprise; why, after all, should anyone wish to pay Peter Barnes, lately cook in Bristol, for medical consultations? Nor should reclaiming his identity prove to be a major problem - there's enough evidence, starting with his medical records at PPTH and ending with his fingerprints at the Princeton Police Department, to prove that he is indeed the world-famous diagnostician, and there are no major legal repercussions to be expected - _should_ he resume his old identity.

And that's the problem: it isn't, ' ... _when_ he resumes his former identity', as it should be. There's a definite question mark there, and that is odd. He has the chance to quit his deadly boring job as cook (now that there's an alternative, he can freely admit that the job sucks) and take up his former much-loved profession again, and yet he's hesitating. It has nothing to do with any sense of loyalty or longing for his life in England; that life seems so alien already, his present one in America fits him so much better that he's surprised it took him so long to realise that he's American. Nor can his reluctance to return to House be traced to an active dislike of the people associated with his former existence in New Jersey. Other than Lisa, he hasn't seen much of any of them so far, and although they are all weird in more than one way, it's an amusing kind of weird, promising a lot more entertainment than his rather staid companions back in Bristol.

No, it's a lot simpler than that: he doesn't like Gregory House. His dislike isn't rooted so much in single aspects of his character that he can pin down, for although his addiction issues are depressing, his self-destructive tendencies annoying and his act of domestic violence (if that was what it was) despicable, it's the attitude which these facets of his character reveal that really gets his goat. Gregory House is a defeatist; when life pitches a left hook at him, he allows it to sock him straight on the jaw. No fight, no evasion, no flight, nothing. He defines himself by what he lacks, not by what he has, whether it's his disability versus his genius or his capsized relationship versus his functioning friendship. As Pete Barnes he's one leg short of a couple and he boasts no close friends whatsoever, but compared to what he knows of Greg House, Pete Barnes is chirpy and optimistic (two terms he'd never have thought he'd apply to himself).

It isn't that he doesn't recognise himself in Gregory House; if anything, he recognises himself all too well. Slipping back into his old identity might be easier if that _weren't_ the case; he'd felt few qualms at taking over the formal trappings of Peter Barnes of Sussex, who'd had nothing whatsoever in common with him and had thus presented no peril to his sense of identity - as far as he'd had one at that time. House, however, poses a very real threat. Slip back into _his_ skin, and it won't be long before House winds his tentacles around him and pulls him back into his former misery. That sounds like a story from one of his paranormal series, but there's a rational background to his fears: once he resurfaces as Greg House, the people who used to know him will reappear with all their old preconceptions and expectations (spending an evening with Chase, Taub and Foreman has alerted him to how his former acquaintances see him and how he reacts to their perception), and he'll probably revert to the habits that caused him to be miserable and malcontent in that previous life of his, for whatever the nature of his past issues, it is unlikely that they'll have dissolved into thin air along with his memories of them.

He doesn't want to be Gregory House.

He knows that he has no choice but to resume his true identity if he is to work as a diagnostician again, but that doesn't mean that he has to go back to _being_ House. He could move to Seattle where no one but Foreman knows him; from what he has seen of Foreman they are unlikely to become bestest buddies, so there's no reason why he shouldn't construct a new existence for himself in Washington the way he did in England, a life which has nothing in common with his life in Princeton.

Which leaves him with an unpleasant task to complete before he reclaims his place in the medical world. Other than sending him a short text message asking him to contact her as soon as he feels up to it, Lisa has left him strictly to his own devices since that fateful anniversary gala - for which he is grateful, very grateful. He has no idea how he would have handled a confrontation with her in those first hours and days after discovering that they have a common past. Come to think of it, he still has no idea how to handle it, but the matter can't be avoided forever, which is why he drives down to Philly the day after he gets Foreman's email.

When she opens the door and sees him standing there, a smile lights up her face, but it disappears as she takes in his sombre expression. Coming out into the hall, she pulls the door to behind her.

"I know you're angry with me ..."

"I'm not," he cuts her off. He'd like to keep this as short as possible. "But there's no sense in this. It didn't work the last time; it won't work this time."

"You don't know that!"

"Nothing has changed: I'm still an addict; I'll relapse if I'm stressed too hard; you'll dump me." He can sense that she wants to contradict him, so he continues quickly, "Maybe not because of a relapse, but sooner or later I'll do something that's 'dump'-worthy, and out I'll go. People don't change, Lisa. Don't fool yourself into believing that either of us have."

She swallows hard. Then she looks down at her feet. He can sense it's because she doesn't want him to see the tears in her eyes.

"I'm sorry," he says.

That makes her head snap up. "You're ... what?"

"Sorry." He scratches an eyebrow with his thumb, now looking down awkwardly in turn. "I didn't mean to ...," he trails off. This is stupid. He's hurting her. Apologising won't change that.

"You're apologising for not giving me another chance?"

"Why not?" he says defensively. "You're getting hurt because _I_ don't want to take a risk."

"You never apologise for things you can change. And you never explain yourself." She comes closer and peers at him in the semi-darkness of the hall. "This isn't about me at all, is it? This is about _you_. You're not worried about me dumping you again - you can't remember the last time, so you have no memory of how it hurt you, and besides, you can't really imagine feeling that intensely about me, can you?" She pauses to give him an opportunity to contradict her statement, but she's right, so he says nothing, his eyes flickering around as he does his best to avoid her gaze. "You're afraid that you could turn violent again, aren't you?"

He's silent; it seems safer than a denial.

"Well, that's illogical. If you are an inveterate domestic abuser, then avoiding _me_ isn't going to change that. You'll just rough up your next girlfriend." When he still doesn't reply, she puts a hand on his arm, saying adjuringly. "Pete, you _aren't_ an abuser. You _didn't_ try to kill me - you'd never as much as lifted a finger against me till then. You ... you should really talk to Wilson about what happened."

"I can't talk to Wilson because his shrink won't let me. But from what Chase has told me about Wilson, his view of my life is anything but objective. I seem to have a knack for polarising people one way or another. So we'll never know, will we? We'll never know whether I tried to kill you, or whether your house was just collateral damage to my working off my frustration, or whether I tried to kill myself. You don't want to expose yourself to that again."

"Let _me_ be the one to decide what I ..."

"No!" he almost shouts. She flinches away. He steps away, rubbing his forehead in frustration.

"Because you know best as usual!" she says with stinging sarcasm.

"Suppose we become an item. One fine day you decide you'd like to end it. What do you do?" he asks more or less rhetorically.

She says nothing.

"Exactly," he says with bitter triumph. "You do _nothing_ , because even if you'd love to kick my sorry ass out the door, you can't risk it. You can't risk me going ballistic and possibly killing someone this time round. You'd be eternally trapped in our relationship. And I - I'd wake up every morning wondering whether we're still together because you _want_ it or because you're too scared to end it."

He rubs his brow tiredly. "This isn't what you deserve or what I want. I want a relationship where my woman doesn't shrink away in fear when I start yelling and doesn't wake up from nightmares where I'm ... doing whatever I do to you in your nightmares."

There's no reply to that. He observes her for long enough to see her teeth draw blood from her lips, and then he turns away to go.

After leaving Lisa's place he drives aimlessly through Philadelphia. Well, maybe not as aimlessly as it seems to him at first. The streets get increasingly disreputable; he's back in the haunts where he bought his car. He isn't sure what he wants here or why he isn't heading back for Princeton until he passes a sordid alley with a shadowy figure in it.

It's just curiosity, he tells himself as he pulls the car into the next free parking spot, his unquenchable need to know everything.

The guy in the alley musters him suspiciously. "Whatdoyawant?" he drawls.

"Vicodin."


	17. Out of the Frying Pan Into the Fire

When James knocks on the door of Nolan's office twenty minutes before the appointed time, Nolan isn't surprised.

"Come in, James," he says pleasantly, closing the file he's working on and putting it aside. "Sit down."

He musters James who, although dressed with his usual care and precision, is looking somewhat ruffled, as though he's been tugging his fingers through his hair. Now his fingers move towards his neck where his tie would be if he was wearing one. He worries the top button of his dress shirt, closes it, opens it again, and gives it a final twist before he sits down opposite Nolan.

"How are you feeling?" Nolan asks.

James hesitates. "Anxious," he says. Nolan nods encouragingly. "Nervous," he adds after a moment with an embarrassed half-laugh. "That's stupid, isn't it?"

"There's nothing stupid about the way you feel," Nolan points out for what must be the zillionth time to the thousandth patient in his long career. He doesn't have to add that it's how James _acts_ on his feelings that matters, not the feelings themselves. James is clever enough to know that himself after months in therapy. Ignorance isn't James's shortcoming; it's the application of existing knowledge to his own situation that's still in the infancy stage.

James picks his words with the precision of a person who has spent many years packaging bad news in attractive wrappings. "It's normal for me to feel anxious. This is a challenging situation, and in view of what happened in Princeton three weeks ago I'd be foolish to overestimate my ability to deal with stress in an adequate manner." Again, Nolan nods encouragingly, leaning back to create a visual impression of giving James space for himself. "But there's no call to be nervous. House is coming for information. He ... he doesn't remember me, and he can't judge me. He has no right to judge me." His voice rises slightly with the last sentence.

"So maybe you're not nervous about how Greg reacts to you, but about how you'll react to Greg."

James closes his eyes and sighs. "Yes."

"Good." James opens his eyes again to look at him enquiringly. "Good that you recognise that it's your reaction that is important at this moment, not Greg's," he explains. "You don't have to do this yet, James. You know that. You don't have to do this at all if you don't want to. I do not consider it an essential part of your recovery process that you face Greg at this point or at any other point in the future. This is your choice, not his."

"No, it isn't," James says wearily. "House is House. He won't let up until his curiosity is satisfied. I may as well get this over with, so I can get on with my life."

Nolan makes a mental note to address this issue with James in a session in the near future as he places the tips of his fingers together and leans his chin on his index fingers. With James it's one step forward and then two steps back, and it's been that way ever since he was admitted. The downside of an intelligence as well-honed as his is that it's not only at the disposal of his conscious thought process, but also at the beck and call of a subconscious that has been conditioned to justify his every thought and action as an act of subservience to the needs of others. James doesn't allow himself to admit, even in his thoughts, that he may be doing something solely for the pleasure it gives him, and wily as he is, his logic is seldom refutable.

This, however, is not the time to discuss such a complex issue or to question his decision to talk to Greg, even if he is deceiving himself regarding his reasons for agreeing to a meeting. Greg is undoubtedly Greg, and shaking him off would require a good portion of resolve and obstinacy, but both are qualities that James possesses in abundance. Warding Greg off while James is in Mayfield is a child's game, and avoiding him once he is released should not pose a challenge for someone of James's resources, both mental and financial. No, James has been itching to see House again with the twitchy eagerness of a small child confronted with a giant roller coaster in a fun park. There's the memory of the last visit when the self-same ride induced violent nausea instead of pleasure, but there's also the undeniable fascination that something so big and fast exudes, the challenge of defeating the juggernaut that was a source of humiliation on the last visit, and the fear that if he skips the ride this time, there's no knowing when the next opportunity will come round.

And then there's James's tendency to blame setbacks on others. He's already swinging everything into place to put this one on House should it turn into an Unpleasant Situation: James is undeniably anxious and nervous, but he is also choosing to apprise Nolan of the fact before the meeting, and he's making very sure that the meeting is seen as _his_ concession to House's demand, not as a mutually desired reunion. Most of this is subconscious, an automatic kicking in of defence mechanisms that James has perfected over the years, but as Nolan has to keep reminding himself, in James's case one can never be sure, and if he invested as much energy into analysing his true motives as he does to hide them from himself, he'd have been out of therapy long ago.

But there's no time for a session now; the remaining fifteen minutes will have to be spent in damage control. Nolan can't help mentally shaking his head at himself. He has known James for decades now, but he continuously makes the mistake of underestimating him in every respect. Greg's genius is so obvious that it's difficult to miss it, and even if one tried to ignore him, his charisma, coupled with his attention-seeking behaviour, would soon force one to pay due attention to him. No, underestimating either Greg's intelligence or his disruptive potential is a mistake that few persons, whether laymen or psychiatrists, ever make. James, on the other hand, is the master of self-effacement. Even now a casual observer would be hard put to believe in his superior intelligence or in the severity of his issues, but after almost half a year with him Nolan has come to the conclusion that it is only thanks to his massive intellectual capacities that James has managed to maintain the façade of a well-balanced individual all these years.

If asked to summarise the difference between the two men, Nolan would say that Greg wastes none of his innate resources in setting up and maintaining complex social networks, preferring to invest everything he possesses into his obsessions, while James primarily works at his public image. One might even say that his public _persona_ is his obsession. (The things James does to convince himself that he's benevolent and caring are extreme and self-damaging: being there for his patients at the oddest hours, donating pieces of himself to them, pushing himself to help until he breaks up under the strain.) Other than that, they are remarkably similar, both of them choosing medicine so as to give their lives some meaning, both manipulative to a high degree and both essentially unable to trust others. James's relationships don't capsize because he's an inveterate cheater, but because he invariably chooses the kind of woman whose ultimate desertion won't disappoint him because he never invested in her anyway. So far, he has only invested in two people, his brother Danny and Greg, and both ran out on him. The problem is that while even as incorrigible an egoist as Greg can be made to see the damage his behaviour inflicts on others - and by extension on himself - it is very difficult to get a martyr to recognise that selflessness and self-sacrifice can be part of as self-serving an agenda as their very opposites.

They are evidently bound for some gruelling therapy sessions this coming week, but now damage control is the motto of the day. "Why don't we set a time limit for this first meeting?" Nolan suggests.

"You think there'll be more?" James asks.

"I doubt Greg's curiosity will be satisfied today," Nolan answers. Nor James's, but that's another issue altogether. "I'd suggest fifteen minutes for a start."

James laughs. "No, fifteen minutes will definitely not satisfy him." He hesitates. "You don't think that a mere fifteen minutes today would be cruel, after he's waited for so long?"

To do James justice one has to admit that he sees things from other people's perspective and empathises with them. What he needs to work on is finding a balance between other people's needs and his own. "I think," Nolan says, "that waiting for another week after having to sit it out for over three years isn't going to be too terrible a hardship, and both of you are better off if he waits a week now than if we push this, causing you distress which will hamper your ability to communicate with him."

"Good, fifteen minutes it is," James agrees, relief etched on his features. "And you'll stay." It's a statement rather than a question.

"Definitely. After what you told me of your last two meetings, I'd strongly advise against a one-on-one interview."

Nolan's secretary sticks her head in through the door. "There's a Peter Barnes here. He says he has an appointment for four, but you've noted ... _Horse_?" She peers at the calendar she's holding, trying to decipher Nolan's handwriting.

"That's fine," Nolan interrupts. "He's the person who is to come at four."

"O-kay," the secretary says with a what-do-I-care inflection. "Can he come in now?"

"Yes, ask him to step in. Oh, and Belinda, could we have some coffee, please?"

The secretary nods and disappears. James unbuttons his right cuff and rolls up the sleeve. Nolan tries to look nonchalant, but can feel himself failing. He last saw Greg over five years ago - he pulled out the file three days ago and checked - but there's no denying that Greg has been more on his mind than many a patient who spent far more time in Mayfield.

Greg enters the room, cane-free and with barely any unevenness in his gait. It's - disconcerting, to say the least, as is the fact that other than the addition of a bald spot on the back of his head, streaks of silvery grey in the remaining hair and the slightest hint of a receding hairline he's showing no further signs of ageing since he departed in a hissy fit all those years ago. If anything he's looking younger, with fewer lines in his face and a couple or so pounds less around his waist. Feeling his own burgeoning waistline beneath the hands loosely clasped over his stomach, Nolan can't help grousing mentally that life isn't fair. Someone who lives as hard and fast as Greg House has always done should look a lot worse.

He rises to greet the newcomer, while James wriggles undecidedly in his chair.

"Hello," he says, coming out from behind his desk. "I'm Darryl Nolan, James's psychiatrist."

He spent a long time pondering on whether to fill Greg in on their connection in his former life, finally deciding that if Greg hasn't heard yet that he spent time in Mayfield, then he, Nolan, won't be the one to apprise him of the fact during this visit. Spring a major revelation like that on him, and there's no knowing which way the visit will go, and James is hardly in a state to cope as it is. It's a tightrope he's walking on here: when Greg does find out there'll be hell to pay, but at the present moment _James_ is his patient, entitled to his care and protection, not Greg. This conflict of interests could have been avoided - he'd never have taken on James as his patient if he hadn't been convinced that Greg would never return - but the deed is done now, and he must make the best of it.

Greg eyes him warily as he nods an acknowledgement without taking any steps towards him, but given his dislike for social conventions and his distrust of psychiatrists, that is hardly noteworthy. He therefore refrains from holding out his hand or even moving anywhere near Greg's personal space; he merely gestures at the coffee table where he has placed two chairs, one for Greg and one for James.

"Sit down, please."

Greg takes the chair closer to the door, the one he always sat in during therapy sessions. James moves over hesitantly from where he was sitting in front of Nolan's desk and sits down opposite Greg. Then he looks enquiringly at Nolan, a glance that Greg picks up on at once.

"Are you going to chaperon us?" he asks, not taking his eyes from James, but evidently speaking with Nolan.

"Yes," Nolan says easily. "We've agreed to keep this conversation short, because I don't want James strained too much as yet." He wonders whether James has noticed Greg's omission; he hasn't introduced himself. Either he knows that Nolan knows him, which seems increasingly unlikely in the face of his total focus on James, or he is still at war with his own identity. "Fifteen minutes, okay?"

"Fifteen minutes? You're joking - I have about one hundred thousand questions! That's censorship!" Greg is disgusted enough to actually look squarely at Nolan, but there's no recognition or curiosity in his gaze, only annoyance.

"You're free to come again - if James consents," Nolan offers.

"You bet!" Greg snorts. He stretches his legs out and crosses his ankles, while his fingers tap on the armrests of his chair.

"So, ask!" James says, breaking his silence.

Greg fixes James with that intense stare of his, but James, kudos to him, is not intimidated. "Do you like monster trucks?" Greg asks, his eyes slightly narrowed.

James is nonplussed. "What, you have one hundred thousand questions, but the one you ask is whether I like monster trucks? Why?"

Greg tips his head, never taking his eyes off James. "It's as good as any," he says.

"No, House, it isn't. If you want me to play along with this, you'll have to give me a reason. I'm not playing your little games with you." James rises as though to leave.

Nolan notes with surprise that Greg's eyes slide away. He nods at James as though to indicate his consent to the conditions that James is proposing, or rather, imposing.

"My team," he says uncomfortably, "couldn't agree on whether we both liked monster trucks or whether you just went along to humour me."

James massages the bridge of his nose. "And that bothered you so much that you couldn't sleep at night."

"Well?" House says. " _Do_ you like monster trucks?"

"I ...," James stutters. He looks around at Nolan, who nods encouragingly.

"Oh, come on!" Greg scoffs. "It's a fifty-fifty. Either you do or you don't."

"I - don't know," James admits.

Greg leans forward to stare at him. "How can you not know?" he says, mystified rather than annoyed now. "I'm the one with amnesia, not you. If I had no idea or decided I needed to go to a show before answering that would make sense, but ... What the hell are they giving you here?" He looks over at Nolan accusingly.

"I suggest we move on to another question," Nolan says, annoyed at himself for being more interested in the dynamics of the situation than in James's increasing distress. He should have interfered at least one minute earlier.

"Great - so monster trucks are off limits," Greg mocks. "Let's simplify this: why don't you tell me what I'm allowed to ask? I'm sure the list of permitted questions is short."

"You know that your question was loaded," Nolan points out, "or else you wouldn't have asked it."

"Okay, another question," Greg says, suspiciously amenable. He pretends to think for a moment, tapping the side of his nose with a finger. Nolan sighs internally; it's clear that his interference has challenged Greg's inner four year old. "Got one: when'd you start drinking?"

Nolan interrupts. "You don't have to answer this," he says to James.

Greg gives him a dirty look, but he doesn't start a hue and cry about censorship or freedom of speech, so the question must be more important to him than his kindergarten manner implies.

"Is this about me or about you?" James asks.

He waggles his chin thoughtfully before he says, "My team says you started drinking because of me, so it could be either."

Now it's James's turn to sigh. He tugs a hand through his messed-up hair and says, "About three years ago."

"Wow! That's quite an achievement, to acquire a major alcohol problem within that time span!"

Nolan is about to interfere again, but James has this one. "You'd be surprised at how quickly and efficiently you can self-destruct when you put your mind to it," he says.

"Oh, you!" Greg says, waggling his finger at James with an amused hiccup. "I can see what you're doing there. Doesn't really apply to me, though, since my reborn persona is pure as driven snow. Hmmm, maybe I should start a new religion."

"Oh, it does apply," James says sharply. "You're on vicodin again."

Nolan almost starts in surprise. The goofy grin fades from Greg's face as he tips his head to muster James. "I'm - not." But anyone who knows him, and Nolan counts himself as one of that elite group, can sense that he's lying because of the small signs of unease that he's emitting - rubbing his non-existent thigh, shifting his gaze ever so slightly, sliding lower in his chair.

Nolan has known James for long enough to be able to tune in to the moods he emanates, and now he's glowing with anger, even if there are no overt signs as yet. His neck muscles, though, are tense and his hands are clenching on the armrests of his chair. Not that one can blame James; he, Nolan, feels much the same. Here Greg is, sans leg, ergo sans pain, his mind cropped of the memories of all those years of suffering and deprivation, starting anew in circumstances all of his own choosing, but instead of grasping the opportunity he's screwing it up. Again.

There is, of course, another side to the matter: the years of uncertainty and emotional homelessness, the shock of unexpectedly stumbling into his past, the revelation that his new screenplay for a promising relationship with an attractive woman is based on an old B movie that was a box office flop. Greg being Greg, it would come as a surprise if he didn't try to relieve the stress of the moment by seeking refuge in a high.

"I can't believe ... ," James commences, but his expression belies his words. He can very well believe that his former friend is back on drugs.

This isn't going anywhere today, so Nolan rises, gesturing towards the door. "We should call it a day, Greg."

Greg pulls up short at that, training piercing eyes at him. (Is James right - are those pupils slightly dilated?) He mentally curses himself; calling someone who is supposedly a stranger _and_ a high-ranking professional by his first name is wildly inappropriate. But all Greg says (for the moment) is, "It's _Pete_."

"Of course," Nolan smiles, glad to be let off the hook for the time being, "but I must ask you to leave now."

An array of conflicting emotions flit across Greg's face: annoyance, guilt, curiosity (aimed at him, not at James), disappointment, but also relief. "What about my ninety-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-eight other questions?"

"They can wait till next week," Nolan says firmly, putting a guiding hand on Greg's elbow.

Greg allows himself to be guided towards the door, but his docility only lasts till Nolan moves ahead of him to open it. Then he turns around briskly and asks, "Why did you choose me as your friend?"

James looks up startled. "I ... didn't."

"Right, I was some stray that stumbled into your yard, and you were too soft-hearted to kick me out again," Greg says bitterly.

"No." James half smiles at some memory. " _You_ chose _me_."

Nolan takes advantage of Greg's gob-smacked state to propel him out of the room and well down the corridor before he releases his arm this time. "Mr Barnes, I have to go back to James. I'm sure you'll manage to find your way out. Call me in five days, and we'll see whether James is up to another session with you."

He returns to his office to find James massaging the back of his neck frantically. It's not a good sign, but it could be worse. Nolan sits down opposite him and leans forward. Carefully he puts a hand on James's arm. "You did fine," he says.

"I was pitiful. _I don't know whether I like monster trucks_ ," James mimics himself. "God!"

"How did you know he's back on vicodin?" Nolan asks, not just curious but also guided by the need to show James that he's far from pitiful to be able to spot something that escaped the notice of his experienced therapist.

"I didn't," James admits. "I heard that familiar rattle in his pocket when he sat down, but it could have been any medication. It was an educated guess, given the events of the past few weeks."

All things considered, Nolan has to admit that maybe Greg is as much a victim of James's manipulations as vice versa. And maybe, just maybe, throwing the occasional challenge in James's way is more beneficial than sheltering him.

* * *

He took the first one out of curiosity. The next one out of boredom. The next one so as to be able to bear Chase when he got drunk. Which is what Chase invariably did when they met up at a bar, which they did twice more that week, which is why he took the next two.

Another one when he found out that his mother died two years ago. He can't remember her, so it wasn't grief; it was disappointment that the only source of information on his early life is gone.

And two to celebrate the fact that his green card wife filed for a divorce the moment she got her green card and left for San Francisco. (Or was it Sacramento? California, anyway.)

And then he stopped keeping count.

He got his first 'refill' so that he'd have something at hand, just in case. By the time he got his second refill he'd stopped justifying to himself what he was doing, just as he'd stopped wondering why he was still in Princeton or why he hadn't even started on the paperwork that'll get him officially reinstated as 'Gregory House'. He simply sent Foreman an email saying that there had been unexpected legal hassles with his paperwork.

The two he took to be able to face his upcoming meeting with Wilson didn't even register properly on his radar any more, it had become so natural.

He has rented a room in an apartment block in downtown Trenton, a shabby affair whose corridors smell of stale urine and cold cigarette smoke (to which he contributes), and where his light sleep is perpetually disrupted by the clunk of feet running up and down the stairs at all hours and by television sets turned up too loud. In order to fit in, one has to be old or illegal or criminal; he fits all three categories.

Tonight, as he trudges down the hall to the door of his room, his nostrils are assailed by the smell of curries from the old Gujarati couple in 105, while raucous teen laughter and hip hop music proceed from 109. He bangs his backpack against the door in passing, but he doubts the kids will hear it over the racket they are making. He's outside his door digging his key out of his pocket when he realises something is wrong. He can hear music from inside his room. He pauses.

(a) He's sure he didn't leave the radio on.  
(b) He's sure he locked the door.

The door, as he ascertains when he puts in the key, isn't locked. It's merely pulled to. He hesitates, but if the person on the other sides means ill, then he's either very brazen or a very big fool to announce his presence so audibly. Pushing the door open he puts his head around it just far enough to get a full glimpse of the room.

There's a guy on the couch playing _his_ guitar. The impudence of it almost takes his breath away. Almost. The obsessive part of his brain is too busy soaking up information to play at oxygen deprivation, so he takes a deep breath and checks what he's got: male, casually dressed, in his late thirties, medium height, brown hair, stubble, grey eyes. Sharp grey eyes. They flicker up to take him in, then they go back to supervising the complicated pattern his right hand is picking out on the strings.

He pushes the door right open and enters, slinging his backpack into a corner and taking off his coat as casually as though he was expecting a total stranger to be sitting uninvited on his couch drinking his beer and eating his peanuts. The stranger continues playing, closing his eyes and rocking his torso to the rhythm. Pete gets himself a beer from the fridge, slamming the door with more energy than the old gadget requires, and returns to the sitting area to look down at the intruder.

His unbidden guest finally looks up properly. "Just like old times."

Okay, so they know each other. Pete frowns in concentration as he considers what possibilities he has of discovering the guy's identity and connection to himself without giving himself away. Seeing his frown the not-stranger adds, "Or maybe not?"

Pete grunts and sits down at the far end of the couch nursing his beer. He's going to have to say something sooner or later, so he chooses a question (play the ball into the opponent's court) that is innocuous under the given circumstances. "How'd you get in?"

His guest looks surprised. "Through the door. It's a simple lock, really. Course, if you want, I'll set up a burglar alarm. Might send the wrong message to potential burglars, though. A burglar alarm implies there's something worth protecting, which in turn makes the place interesting for burglars." He looks around pointedly at the shabby decor and the few personal belongings.

Loquacious, a lock picker, security skills. Potentially a criminal. His former drug dealer?

"My superficial poverty didn't keep _you_ from breaking and entering."

"I guess you could call it that," the lock picker concedes. "I prefer to call it a social visit for our mutual benefit." Off Pete's sceptical look he adds, "See, I feel bad about what happened. Should've warned you about Lisa. Or her about you."

Putting the guitar aside so that it leans against the coffee table, he waits for a comment, but none is forthcoming - Pete is too busy absorbing whatever this fellow is saying. So he's someone who knew both him and Lisa, and who is on first name terms with her. Not from the hospital, because there they all call Lisa by her last name. 'Security skills' rings a bell somewhere. It was something Lisa said. He sifts through his memory, a task quickly accomplished since his memory only dates back some three-and-something years. She said she'd dated a PI once. But is this guy likely to be Lisa's ex? The man is somewhat creepy - he's obtrusively familiar and his demeanour is somewhere between naive and cunning - so your friendly wayside pharmacist seems the likelier option. But Lisa and drugs?

The social visitor continues after a moment, "But you know how it is: you start giving people advice and they think of all sorts of reasons why your advice must be bad. Like, one is Lisa's ex and one is still bearing her a grudge for dumping one. Which is a reasonable enough assumption, except that I didn't hold a grudge against her. Or you."

Hang on, _he's_ the man whom Lisa dumped so as to date him, Pete? He really, really needs to investigate Lisa's life in addition to his own if her exes are going to spring surprise visits on him. He'd rather not be socked on the jaw by some has-been who holds him responsible for the vagaries of Lisa's romantic imbroglios.

"Well, maybe I did have a grudge," Lisa's ex continues unabashed, "but not a big one. See, I _knew_ it was coming. Lisa dumping me for you, I mean, not your little demolition stunt. Always knew we wouldn't last, not with you pining away like a big moon-calf and bringing out all her mothering instincts. Asking her to marry me was just sort of flipping you the bird, since I knew I didn't stand a chance of leading her up the aisle." He half turns to Pete to waggle a finger at him. "You know, that's a good question: would I have asked Lisa to marry me if there'd been the slightest chance that ultimately I'd have _had_ to marry her? Because - don't get me wrong! - Lisa is a great woman, but she's a bit like, y'know, those insects, the ones where the female bites the male's head off after mating. Cuz seriously, who dumps a guy the day after accepting his proposal?"

"Praying mantis," he says on autopilot, the part of his brain that isn't connected to his speech centre too busy leaching the golden nuggets of information to pay much attention to the baser verbal ore surrounding them. So Lisa dumped this fellow the day after they got engaged so as to date him. He'd feel more flattered if he could make out what Lisa saw in his rival in the first place. Just now he feels disappointed that Lisa is using this oddball to - what exactly is Lisa doing?

No harm in asking - this is something he can't possibly be supposed to know. "Why did Lisa send you?"

"Not Lisa. Julia," his visitor says.

And who, pray, is Julia?

The PI is kind enough to answer his unspoken question, though it takes him a while to get there. "People tend to underestimate her - I did, too, you know - because she married that big klutz and gave up her career for her family, but hey! She grew up with that nightmare of a mother and _survived_ , better than Lisa did for sure. She's got a lot of street cred, that girl. So when Lisa phones Julia and asks her for the telephone number of her couples counsellor Julia figures it can only be one of two things. One, Lisa is in a new relationship and wants things to go smoothly right from the start. Thing is, there are two types of people." He scratches his head. "Well, three, really. The first type goes dancing on volcanoes believing they won't get their feet burnt if they just dance lightly enough, and are surprised when they still do. That's Lisa. That type doesn't do couples counselling in a new relationship because 'it's going to be brilliant', isn't it? The second type knows they'll get their feet burnt, but they can't resist volcanoes. That's you. That type doesn't do counselling either, because when the fire's singeing your feet, words won't help, right?"

He nods in helpless approval. "And the third type?" he can't help but ask.

"The third type avoids volcanoes after getting burnt once," his guest says smugly. "That's me."

"Okay, and what's second?"

"Huh?"

"You said Lisa asking for couples counsellors could only be one of _two_ things."

"Ah, yes. So Julia figures that if it isn't a new relationship, then it must be an old one that's gone wrong once before, because that would explain Lisa's uncharacteristic amenability to the idea of taking advice. But that only leaves two options - well, three again, but let's just ignore the third one, - so Julia contacts the one that she _hopes_ it is. That's me again. But you see, I happen to know that it can't be me, because I've got a wife and kid now, second one's on the way, so," he shrugs expressively, "I'm really not interested in Lisa anymore, not in that way. And that only leaves you."

Couples counselling and Lisa. She'd seemed accepting, resigned, when he told her that it was over, but she must have hurt more than he'd anticipated if she's contemplating such drastic measures, 'drastic' in the sense that neither of them are the type to agree to counselling unless blackmailed or coerced into it. It must surely be clear to her that any attempt on her part to persuade him to salvage their relationship in this manner will be met with a generous carpet bombing of ridicule and sarcasm. Not that he's really prepared to discuss the matter. There's just one prerequisite for couples counselling, and that's the one they don't meet: they aren't a couple.

"So Julia sent you to me," Pete says dully.

"Yes. Well, not quite. Actually, no. She asked me to make some discreet enquiries concerning your present location, and at first it looked as though you weren't here. But then I show your picture in a seedy nightclub, and whaddaya know, they remember seeing you recently. So then I go around to all the hotels in Princeton and Trenton with your picture instead of your name, and that's how I find out that you've been using 'Peter Barnes' as your stage name. After that it's easy." He picks up some papers that are lying on the coffee table and leafs around in them.

"Clever, that," he resumes, brandishing Pete's British passport. "House - Barnes. A barn is a shell of a house, only suitable for animals and farm tools. Just like you!" There's an angry glint in his eyes now. "Or what's left of you. Acquitted due to lack of evidence, fired, licence rescinded, false identity, back on drugs."

Pete's gaze automatically goes to his coat where he keeps his pill bottle. The detective's eyes follow his, and then the younger man leaps up and strides over to Pete's coat, expertly patting it down. Pulling the pill bottle out he squints at it, and then he rattles it. There's a single pill inside that he takes out and licks experimentally.

"Totally like old times," he finally says, "except that you don't have a stash here. As yet." Of course the _schmuck_ has searched the place, else he wouldn't have Pete's passport. He pops the pill back in the bottle. "Oh, sorry, hope you don't mind. Or would you prefer me to throw it away now that I've licked it?"

Pete doesn't answer that. Insisting that he wants to keep it after it's been licked would sound whiny, yet it is his last vicodin and getting more is always tricky. The PI sighs at his lack of response and tosses the bottle in a high curve into the bin. Pete follows it with his eyes; if all else fails he can dig it out of the trash again.

The other man is regarding him with a sardonic grin on his face. "You always say people don't change. Guess you're right."

The man's know-it-all smugness is grating and his air of superiority bloody annoying. "If Julia didn't send you and you aren't interested in Lisa anymore, then why are you here?"

"I didn't say I wasn't interested in Lisa any more. I am - as a friend."

Pete snorts derisively.

The other man's eyes narrow. "That's a concept that you can't understand, isn't it," he says with a dangerous undertone in his voice, "that a guy can break up with someone, and still care for them and wish them well? For you it's all about intoxication and possession."

"Right, and you were in it for the beauty of her immortal soul," Pete mocks.

"I don't mind admitting that she's stunning, and great in bed," the detective says, returning to his previous amiable manner. He tips his head sideways at Pete, and his manner grows cold once more. "But she's a lot of others things too: really bright, warm-hearted, caring. Yeah, she screwed you over royally, like she screwed me over royally. Feel pissed at her, yell at her, show her the cold shoulder, be passive-aggressive, marry hookers, by all means - but don't even try to pretend that her bullshit gives you the right to bulldoze through her house and terrorise her. Getting dumped is one of the hazards of being in a relationship; don't like, don't buy."

This is what being Gregory House boils down to: everyone will always see the near-murderer in him, and nothing much else. "Look, it's in the past and it's over, okay?" he says wearily, running one hand over his face.

"Yeah, it _was_ over when you had the sense to disappear, but now you've returned, and Lisa is naive enough to give you another chance. But I'm not. See, I know how this will go. She gives you another chance, you screw it up, she dumps you, you go psychopathic all over her. Read the papers: women don't get killed by the random rapist waiting for them in a lonely corner of the park when they go jogging. They get maimed, beaten up and killed by their exes. So, ..." He rises to loom over Pete. "Stay away from her. I'll find out if you don't."

This is where he should point out that he has no intention whatsoever of going near Lisa again ...

"And then you'll what?" Pete can't help asking provocatively, leaning back comfortably on the couch to get a better view of his former rival.

"You remember the last time you pissed me off? And that time it was just a measly condo we were fighting over." He considers the last statement for a moment. "Okay, it _was_ Lisa we were fighting over - but not her life. Trust me, if you don't lay off, it'll be a hundred times worse than cutesy little opossums in your bathtub or all the other stuff."

Pete still has no idea what half of this is about, but there's no doubt that the guy is threatening him with bodily harm. He needs to get a handle on this before he's short another leg. "Cute, this _fraternal_ affection for Lisa," he says, the innuendo practically highlighted. "Your wife must be proud to have such a chivalrous husband."

The PI deigns to smirk in a self-satisfied manner. "Yeah, actually she is. Because, you see, I told her that I'm coming here and why - about how you stalked Lisa and nearly killed her, how Lisa suffered so badly from PTSD that she had to quit her job, how Rachel got crippled, and how both will suffer for the rest of their lives. And the funny thing is, women don't like it when guys do that, not even when they do it to other women. My gal's really supportive that way - I had to stop her from coming along. Because, _I_ would take a jagged-edged knife and gut you if anything happened to Lisa, but my wife would take that knife and gut you pre-emptively, so to say. So if you want to get in contact with my wife to tell her about our little chat, be my guest. But meet up outside the house; we've just put down new carpets and blood stains don't clean out that well."

He turns to go, and doing so he 'accidentally' knocks over the guitar and steps into it. There's a resounding pling followed by a sickening crunch, and Pete can feel his guts contracting in anger. He half rises, his fists clenched, but the other man raises both his hands, half defensively, half challengingly.

"Whoa, don't even think of it. I can kick your leg out from under you faster than you can say, 'cripple'," he advises. "Last round Lisa chose you, and I didn't interfere, because although I knew you're a crazy loon, I didn't dream you'd ever harm her. See, even _I_ believed you loved her." His mouth twists in self-condemnation. "Trust me, this round I'll play as dirty with you as you did with her." He turns round and leaves, slamming the door behind him.

Pete stands frozen for a moment, still absorbing what just happened. He's a complete idiot who puts his foot into it for no reason whatsoever (which is not exactly news) and who has no sense of self-preservation. He could have told this sociopath that he has no interest in reviving his former relationship with Lisa, but no, he _had_ to go and provoke the guy simply because he could. Of all the dumbass things he's done these past years, that one tops the list with a wide margin to spare. Because this dick may have the loosest tongue in New Jersey, but there's no doubt that he means his threats. Not the knife, perhaps, but he has the ability and the brains to make Pete's life very uncomfortable, if not potentially dangerous.

Dangerous. And the guy's a PI. Pete looks around his small, dreary apartment, considering potential hiding places for surveillance devices. Two hours later he has two bugs, a webcam, and an intimate knowledge of all the nooks and crannies in his apartment. The good news is that next time his search will be a lot quicker; the bad news is that he'll have to repeat the search on a daily basis, because Lisa's PI may well replace the equipment a few times before he gives up. Accordingly, he isn't exactly feeling peachy. He's tired, dirty (who'd have thought that such a small place can harbour such a lot of grime?), and sore from crawling into barely accessible corners. He could do with a little relaxation. He considers calling Chase to have a drink with him, but dealing with one alcoholic fulfils his quota for the day. Besides, when he's drunk Chase is too maudlin to be fun. 'Gloomy' he can do himself - he doesn't need Chase for that.

He peers at the bin, but then he remembers the detective's scornful, assessing glance after tossing his last vicodin in there, and he'll be damned if he'll dig the bottle out of the trash and take a vicodin that the other man licked. So he grabs his coat and his keys, and heads back outside.

* * *

At the best of times Trenton is a dismal place; on a wet autumn night it has the shabby desperation of an ageing prostitute. No one who can avoid it ventures outside; windows that aren't boarded up have their curtains firmly drawn against encroaching stares; street lights that aren't broken fight a lost battle against the damp, foggy darkness.

His apartment isn't far from the disreputable area where Lisa's ex presumably picked up his tracks in a nightclub. The streets here aren't quite as deserted as in the rest of Trenton. Pink and red neon lights flash on the facades of bars and clubs, a few people hang around in doorways, here and there noisy groups (male, mostly) brave the steady drizzle as they move from one establishment to the next. He soon finds what he's looking for, a small bar sandwiched between a night club and a massage parlour. When he enters, his eyes need a few moments to adjust to the semi-darkness. It's a far cry from the after-work bar that his fellows took him to on his first night in Princeton; the people here don't look as though they have any work after which to relax. There are two slot machines in a corner, both occupied by middle-aged women with a world-weary air, a flat screen in another showing a news flash that no one is paying any attention to, a few booths and a long bar behind which a fat barman wearing a greasy tank top and sporting tattoos up both arms is drying glasses.

He sits down at the bar and orders a scotch. When the barman slides his glass over to him, he asks, "Is Jim here?"

The barman nods over to an ill-lit booth close to the exit to the toilets. Pete glances over casually, but he remains at the bar, taking sips of scotch and twirling peanuts. When his glass is half-empty he picks it up and walks over to the booth, sliding in opposite the man seated there. The man is in his mid-thirties, emaciated and twitchy, exactly the sort of person Pete doesn't want to do business with, so he keeps it short.

"I heard you have vicodin."

"Got Percocet," Jim offers.

"It'll do." He slips a wad of bills along the bench. Jim palms them, counting them by feeling them without taking his eyes off Pete. When he's done, he gets up and disappears in the direction of the toilets. When he comes back, he says, "Second stall, inside the tank."

He disappears to the toilets in turn, heading straight for the second stall. After locking the door he turns towards the tank. The lid is easily removed; on its inside, fastened with duct tape, is a pill box. He tears the tape off and scrunches it up, pops open the lid and examines the pills, giving one of them an experimental lick. Yes, it's the real stuff; Jim may look shifty, but it seems he knows better than to screw over new clients. He casts an appraising glance around the restroom before he leaves - Jim's stash must be hidden somewhere here, but he can't spot any likely hiding places. Then again, Jim was gone for so long that it's possible that he went out through the backdoor and came back in again.

_Mission accomplished_ , he thinks as he turns back into the corridor, but almost immediately he notices that something is off. The music, an irritating backdrop the entire time till now, has stopped playing. There's no low murmur of talk, laughter, or clink of glasses coming from the bar; instead the silence is broken only by a rapid staccato of shouts. A bar fight? He hesitates, considering the option of leaving via a backdoor himself rather than getting involved in potential unpleasantness, but before he can decide whether to start looking for an alternative exit, two men lope into the corridor, stopping short when they see him.

"Got another one here," one of them calls back over his shoulder. He advances towards Pete stretching out his hand. In the semi-dark, Pete can't see what he's holding, so he instinctively flinches away. "Trenton Police Department," the man says with authority. "We must ask you to come with us to verify your identity, sir."

In sum, the two men are about as old as he is, and as far as he can make out they have four legs among them, so he has no choice but to accept their 'invitation'. They return to the bar, one officer in front of him, the other behind him. He blinks rapidly as they enter the room: instead of semi-darkness the place is mercilessly lit up, the neon light giving everyone an unhealthy pallor. The barkeeper is now in front of the bar, arms crossed, seriously pissed. One booth has been turned into an impromptu office where a policeman is taking down personal data. The bar's patrons are queuing up in front of this provisory while two officers go down the queue checking papers and asking questions. Two more are stationed at the entrance to prevent guests and staff from leaving. Whoever has been searched and cleared is escorted outside.

"No one deals drugs in here," the barkeeper mutters sulkily. "I watch out - I do."

"I'm sure you do," one of the officers says in a bored, unconvinced tone.

"I can't help it if someone sneaks in and does some dealin' under the table. Can't frisk everyone who comes in, can I?" the barkeeper whines.

"No, you can't. But when someone occupies a booth for hours, and people drop in to see him like he's a fortune teller at a ren fest, then it's time to call your friendly neighbourhood cops."

"Over here, sir," one of the plain clothes officers escorting Pete says, pointing towards a wall. "Face the wall, stand with your legs apart and place your hands on the wall at shoulder height."

Pete shrugs and moves over to it. He isn't worried about the Percocet - he can always say he needs it for the phantom pain in his leg and that it's from a scrip he got while still in England. They pat him down rapidly and efficiently, extract and check his wallet and inevitably find the bottle with the pills. They look at each other, and then at Pete.

"Come along," the younger one says, all politeness gone from his tone.

"Those are legit meds," Pete immediately counters. "Got a peg leg, and I need it for the pain." He knocks on his prosthetic.

"Have you got a scrip for these?" the older officer asks, already knowing the answer.

"Not here."

"Then you're coming to the precinct with us," the officer decrees. "Papers?"

Pete hands him his passport. The officer bypasses the queue to get to his bookkeeping colleague.

"Sol, take this guy down. He has narcotics, no scrip, and a British passport. We're taking him in."

Ten minutes later he's at the precinct, where he´s subjected to an intensive and humiliating search, after which he gets his picture and fingerprints taken. He's not unduly worried; there's bound to be some unpleasantness once it's discovered that his fingerprints are a perfect match for Gregory House, but in the greater scope of things he's small fry. Yeah, possession of prescription narcotics, but given the minor quantity and the time it would take to disprove his story of a scrip from England, he's sure that any sane judge will kick the matter right out of court before the preliminary hearing. He'll get his wrist slapped and he'll acquire a hefty lawyer's bill that he won't be able to pay until Foreman coughs up some of the ready, but once he's in Seattle the matter will be forgotten.

He does a quick mental calculation. He could, of course, admit to being House and explain how he comes to possess papers stating that he is Peter Barnes, but would anyone believe his story of amnesia (should he decide to tell it)? It would be different if he'd already started the proceedings to have his old identity returned to him, but now, after being busted for drugs, his story will sound very convenient. Much too convenient. Already, unbidden, a hundred different reasons spring to mind why Gregory House would masquerade as Peter Barnes, all more credible than total retrograde amnesia and none of them likely to improve his standing with the law-keeping forces. All things considered, he stands a better chance of leaving here a free man if he braves it out than if he trusts in the forces of veracity and uprightness.

That's his outlook as he kicks his heels in the interrogation room waiting for someone to come and start water boarding him or whatever it is they do in Trenton when they catch a big-time mobster like him. After he's waited there for an hour, the door opens, admitting a tall, heavy built man with short grey hair carrying a file. From his position in the doorway he looks at Pete, his thin lips working. Pete leans back, crosses his ankles and folds his hands over his stomach. The interrogating officer closes the door behind him and sits down opposite Pete. He leans forward mustering Pete silently, his fingers interlaced on the table in front of him.

Psychological warfare by silence is a game two can play, so Pete looks around the room whistling tunelessly, deliberately ignoring his opponent. The detective leans back in turn, extracts a packet of chewing gum from his pocket, unwraps one and pops it into his mouth.

"Illegal or fraudulent possession of prescription opiates," the officer finally says in a voice devoid of all inflection.

"I've already told your colleagues ...,"

"I'm sure you have," the officer interrupts him softly, but firmly, "and I'm sure you can come up with a thousand innovative reasons for possessing oxycodone, but I can't think of a single one that would explain why a law-abiding citizen would masquerade as ..." He takes the passport out of the file and opens it, making a pretence of reading the data inside before looking at him mockingly. "… Peter Barnes from Bristol, UK."

It's time to bluff it out. "Look, I can't help it if your technicians are morons who can't scan and file fingerprints correctly, ..."

The detective's smile barely skims his lips, never mind about reaching his eyes. "You haven't changed one bit, have you? As arrogant as ever."

An icy hand crawls up Pete's spine. There's only one way this cold-eyed bastard can know whether he's changed or not. And he'd been so naive as to believe the worst part of his day was over when Lisa's PI left his apartment. Wilson was distant, the PI openly hostile, but neither emanated the intense contempt that's radiating off this guy.

The detective continues, "But I've learned a lot since our last meeting. Al Capone wasn't convicted for his Mafia activities, but for income tax evasion. I'm not going to try to get a conviction for any offense where your friends' lies could work in your favour. In your case I'll stick to black on white: fake papers, fake identity. It may only get you a few months in jail, but I'm pretty sure that in those months you'll have alienated so many people that your little stay will be extended, so in the end justice _will_ be done." He rises, looking down at Pete expressionlessly. "You have one phone call. I suggest you call your lawyer."


	18. Queer Lodgings

His first reaction to the idea of getting himself legal aid is denial. A handful of narcotics, and papers that are legitimately his - what can they do to him? He may as well sit this out.

But then the reality of his situation kicks in: although _he_ has no memory of his previous misdeeds, the legal system does, and his two previous runs-in with the judiciary do not speak for him. Both times it was _in dubio pro reo_ , in both cases because of the evidence of biased witnesses. And although he was acquitted of attempted manslaughter, he _did_ get sentenced for driving under influence and reckless endangerment. That makes him a repeat offender.

When he is given his phone call, he figures it may be difficult to get a suitable defence lawyer: he doesn't know/remember anyone and his finances won't exactly attract top-notch people. He needs someone who knows the local law scene and who carries a bit of clout, because this time he may actually need decent legal representation to get out of the corner he has painted himself into. It's bloody annoying, since whatever his reasons for masquerading as Peter Barnes, it was not with the intention of perpetrating crimes. His first thought is to call Chase, but Chase is usually wasted two hours after his shift ends. It's no use trying to get hold of Taub - if he isn't doing an extra shift at the hospital, then he's working his second job, or his third job. Or possibly babysitting one of his two daughters. Or (although this is somewhat unlikely, given that he's perpetually tired) he's conceiving daughter #3. Wilson's in Mayfield, so that leaves only one person.

She doesn't pick up the phone, for which he's grateful because he'd rather not talk to her, so he leaves a message on the answer machine: _Been arrested in Trenton. Need a lawyer. Send one over to the precinct in the morning._ He figures it'll give her a rough idea.

It's midnight when he's brought into the interrogation room again. The officer who interrogated (if one can call it that) him earlier is seated there already as is - Lisa. He stops short at the door, dismayed, only to be pushed in by the cop who escorted him from the detention cell. Lisa has a sleeping Rachel draped across her lap and is looking as pissed as he feels.

"I told you to send me a lawyer," he says to pre-empt whatever diatribe she prepared on the drive down from Philly, "not to come with your cheerleading team. Oops, forgot, kid can't do a toe touch, can she?"

That hits Lisa where it hurts most; she recoils and her protective shell drops, giving him a brief glimpse of destroyed hopes and years of maternal worry.

The detective rises protectively. "Dr Cuddy, you insisted on this meeting - against my advice. You are under no obligation to put up with this."

Lisa's walls are up again. She looks away from him to the detective and shakes her head. "No, it's okay. I'm fine."

"Oh, great! Does that mean I don't have to stay either?" Pete asks, turning ostentatiously towards the door.

"Sit down!" the detective orders. When Pete doesn't comply, he moves swiftly over to him, takes his arm and shoves him onto the chair next to Lisa's. Then he turns back to Lisa. "Dr Cuddy, he's an addict and he's an abuser. People like that don't change. _He_ hasn't changed. Your relationship to him nearly got you killed. Don't, please don't do this to yourself! I've seen too many women carried out of their homes on stretchers, women like you, clever, attractive, with a life over and above what the abuser could offer them, but blinded by their inability to accept that there are people who can't or won't learn."

"Amen," Pete says.

"Shut up!" Lisa snaps. She returns her attention to the detective. "Detective, you've had extensive dealings with him. He's an arrogant ass, he's an idiot, and he has no sense of self-preservation whatsoever. But tell me, was he ever physically aggressive towards you?"

"In case you don't remember," the detective says with relish, "he shoved a thermometer up my rectum. That's assault. "

Intrigued, he asks, "I did?" before he can stop himself. The detective's eyes narrow.

"In case _you_ don't remember, Detective Tritter," Lisa retorts, "you kicked his cane out from under him first."

"Violence against cripples," Pete practically crows, pulling a face at the detective. "On the Richter scale for abuse I'd say that's a ...,"

"Shut _up_!" Lisa repeats. "Detective, he was picked up with a negligible quantity of narcotics suitable for personal use only. Chances are that he'll be able to present a scrip for them."

The detective's brows rise. "You mean that you'll lie for him. Again."

"Excuse me?" Lisa's brows rise in played incredulity.

"Dr Cuddy, let's not play games. You perjured yourself to keep him out of jail before, and you'll do it again. I was counting on something like that happening - the loyalty that House can command without ever returning the favour never ceases to amaze me - but I didn't think it would be _you_."

"I didn't ...," Lisa begins, but on seeing Tritter's unbelieving mien she breaks off in mid-sentence. "Never mind."

"You'd do well to examine your motives for helping House, Dr Cuddy. And your priorities." This last with a pointed look at the sleeping child in her arms.

" _Your_ motives, Detective, won't bear a close scrutiny either," Lisa counters. "House has been in the Princeton area for less than a month, where he is arrested by _your_ men in _your_ precinct. And you want me to believe that's a coincidence?"

"I want you to believe that because it is - a coincidence," Tritter says equably. " _My_ men didn't pick him up - I'm in Homicide now. Narcotics got an anonymous tip-off, so they raided that bar. I had no idea he'd been brought in until the head of Narcotics called me to tell me that the fingerprints of their latest detainee matched those of Gregory House." He shrugs. "But just so we're on the same page, it isn't the drugs that are bothering us, it's his false papers."

If he's hoping that his revelation comes as a surprise, he is disappointed. "His papers?" Lisa says and laughs. "You can forget that."

"Really?" the detective says. "Dr Cuddy, why don't you stick to medicine and let the police deal with identity fraud?"

"This," Lisa says with a hint of triumph, "is not what it seems. Dr House is in the process of having his identity proven and returned to him, as you will see when you check with the Princeton Township Health Department. Until then ...,"

Pete has been shifting uneasily in his chair. Tritter, observing this, says mildly, "I think House has something to say on that issue?"

Lisa twists somewhat awkwardly in her chair to face him, hampered by the child hanging in her arms like a sack of potatoes. "You _have_ initiated proceedings to have yourself identified, haven't you? Foreman said, ... You idiot! Why the hell haven't you got your ass to the Township and filed your papers?"

"I - don't know," he says somewhat helplessly, but truthfully. So Foreman's been gossiping with her. He shouldn't be surprised; Foreman isn't likely to drop as useful a connection as the future Dean of Philadelphia City Hospital.

Lisa huffs, and then she speaks to Tritter. "Can I have a few moments alone with him?"

Detective Tritter purses his lips, but then he gets up and leaves the room.

As soon as the door closes behind Tritter, Pete can sense the full force of Lisa's emotions, pent up till now behind the dam that her public persona provides.

"Oxycodone?" she says dangerously. "Are you mad?"

"The last weeks have been stressful," he says evasively.

" _Stressful_?" She chokes back a hysterical laugh. "Pete, do you have any idea what your life as an addict was like? You were miserable, totally miserable!" Her voice has risen; Rachel stirs in her arms and gives a moan of protest. Lisa re-settles the child, lowering the volume but not the intensity of her voice when she returns to berating him. "You went through that - that _insane_ procedure to escape from all this: the addiction, the misery, the guilt. Why would you want to return to the worst part of your previous life?"

"Who says I can separate my life into neat little drawers where I get to choose which ones I open and which ones stay closed? The amnesia doesn't change the fact that I'm an addict," he growls.

"No, but it changes ... _should have changed_ your perspective on yourself." She leans her forehead on Rachel's hair, so that her voice is muffled. "I thought that was kind of the idea of the whole procedure." She raises her head again and, seemingly having tanked energy from her daughter's pheromones, changes tack. "Okay, let's concentrate on getting you out of here."

" _Told_ you to get me a lawyer. I can survive here till tomorrow - it isn't the first time, or so I've heard, that I'll have to spend a night in the slammer."

She raises her face and says bitingly, "This isn't the kind of situation that can be settled by a lawyer alone. You do realise what this looks like? You're claiming to have come by Peter Barnes's identity thanks to total retrograde amnesia. But despite your amnesia, of all the millions of places you could have gone to you just happen to have landed in exactly the same place you were living in before. There's no way Tritter, or whichever of his colleagues is responsible for you, is ever going to buy that."

"Well, I haven't told them about the amnesia," he interjects.

"You haven't ... What _have_ you told them?"

"Nothing. Thought it might be a good idea to wait for my lawyer before I shoot off my mouth," he improvises.

She looks at him with disbelief. "'Good ideas' are generally wasted on you. You didn't _want_ to tell them, like you never told me. Fine; I understand. It's your private, _private_ life, and you don't want other people nosing around in it. But you blew that when you got caught with a pocketful of oxy."

Tritter re-enters the room and looks down at them, his brows slightly raised. "Well, Dr Cuddy? Shall we call it a night?"

"I'd like to take him with me," Lisa says politely, but firmly.

Tritter smiles thinly. "We'd all like a lot of things, ..."

"Detective, you don't have a case. Not regarding the papers," Lisa interrupts. "House has retrograde amnesia."

"Dr Cuddy, I may be a humble detective, but I do know a thing or two about amnesia - it's a popular ploy. The amnesia House was suffering from after crashing his car only affected ...,"

"I'm not talking about that. He did this to himself. On purpose. And being House, he did a thorough job. The point here is that after he came to in strange surroundings without his real papers, he had no chance anymore of rectifying the error in his identity, not until he came here and ran into people who recognised him. Now, you can drag him to court and try to get a conviction for the original crime of fraudulently planning to gain a new identity, but I doubt you'll have a case there, since the damaged party isn't the American government, but the British one. Besides, I'm pretty sure he now counts as mentally compromised and is therefore not culpable."

Tritter looks at him speculatively. He scowls back and fidgets.

"Total retrograde amnesia?" the detective asks with deceptive softness.

"Yes," Lisa affirms staunchly.

"Can you prove that?"

"Yes, of course!"

"Okay," Tritter says unexpectedly. "He can go. His papers stay."

"Sorry?" Lisa says.

"He can go," Tritter repeats, his expression blandly innocent. "There'll be a hearing, at which I strongly advise that he appear, _with_ a lawyer if he knows what's good for him."

Lisa is totally flummoxed by this unexpected windfall.

"Unless you'd prefer for him to stay here after all," Tritter adds malevolently.

"I may have amnesia, but I'm not a vegetable. You can talk to me directly," Pete interposes.

"Okay," Tritter says. "I can't keep you for much longer without a warrant, which will be difficult to obtain if Dr Cuddy starts pulling strings. I'm keeping your papers - your British papers - instead. You won't be able to leave the country. If your tale of amnesia doesn't hold, you're looking at about ten years. If it does, ..." He pauses.

"... then you're going to come out of this looking like an idiot," Pete completes for him.

"Oh, _please_ shut up!" Lisa says tiredly. "If you want to stay here, just say so."

"I don't think _I'll_ be the one to shed a few feathers," Tritter says with a superior smile. "Goodnight, Dr Cuddy, House." He nods and leaves the room.

Half an hour later Lisa's car pulls away from the precinct. After a short altercation about their destination, which he wins, Lisa makes for his apartment, her Satnav guiding her through the dreary lanes. Rachel, who woke out of her slumbers when Lisa strapped her into her booster seat, is crying in the back seat, not a full-fledged deluge, but the incessant moans of an overtired child whose seat belt prevents her from finding a comfortable sleeping position.

Lisa catches his irritated glance in the back mirror. "My neighbour was out. Call a taxi if it bothers you!"

He would, not because of Rachel, but because he doesn't want to be beholden to Lisa. Unfortunately, his finances are beginning to look bleak; he hasn't been working regularly since returning to Princeton, the legal hassle he's gotten himself into will cost some (and then some again), the paperwork for his new/old ID some more. A taxi may seem a negligible expense, but he has to start economising somewhere.

"There must be some assets left from your time in Princeton," Lisa remarks out of nowhere. "You didn't have any major expenditures other than sinfully expensive scotch, so there must be money sitting in some bank account. You should ask ...,"

"Wilson," he completes her sentence.

"Yes. I'll write down the names of some lawyers for you. The one who defended you after the crash is still practicing, I think, but he wasn't all that brilliant."

They relapse into broody silence until they reach his place.

"Are you sure you don't want to come back to Philly with us?" Lisa asks as he unstraps himself. "I don't think you should be alone just now."

He swings his legs out of the door. "I'm fine!" he says more forcefully than is necessary or convincing.

She rolls her eyes. "If you change your mind, call me and I'll pick you up."

They both know it won't happen, if only because of Rachel. He can't expect her to drag the kid out of bed again to come chasing him. He stumps up the few steps to the front door and lets himself in without looking back. His apartment is on the second floor and there's no elevator, but his balance has improved a lot since he started running, so that one flight is no problem anymore.

The Actual Problem surfaces when he approaches the door to his apartment, although 'wafts his way' probably describes its first manifestation more accurately. The odour stops him short in his tracks, as does the sight of a sliver of light under his door. He's reasonably sure that he turned his lights off before he left, and he's absolutely sure that he has nothing that could cause a smell like that. Opening the door slowly, he sticks his head around to peer inside and recoils, hit by an unbelievable stench that makes the tainted air in the corridor outside seem balmy like a summer breeze.

Cat, he decides, cat's faeces. Taking a deep breath he goes in, watching his steps. It's all over the place - on the rug, smeared across the walls and distributed over his bed. There's no way he can spend the night here. And there's no way a cat could have climbed vertically up a straight wall and smeared its faeces there.

He dashes into the bedroom, throws a few items of clothing into his backpack, filches his toothbrush and shaver from the bathroom and ... sees his Ossur blade in a corner. What's left of his Ossur blade. Suddenly impervious to the stench, he walks over to it slowly and picks it up. The blade itself is intact, although one can see traces of violence on it too, but the shaft is bent in two places and the straps have been ripped off the socket. Even though it looks as though one might be able to bend it into shape, he knows that it can't be salvaged; the forces acting on every inch of the prosthetic during running make it far too likely to break due to material fatigue.

He's standing there holding it when he hears a muted exclamation from the living room, startling him out of his reverie. He drops the prosthetic, picks up his backpack again and goes to investigate. Lisa is standing in the middle of the room, staring around with a WTF-look on her face.

"Where'd you come from?" he barks in an effort to cover up the emotions the ruined leg awakened in him.

"Downstairs. I hadn't left yet. I was waiting for a light to go on in some apartment, but nothing happened, so I got worried."

Of course nothing happened, because her PI left his on after his rampage through the apartment.

Lisa looks around the apartment, shock plastered all over her face. He takes her arm and drags her out, hoping that she hasn't had the time to take in the exact nature of the desecration.

"Phew!" she says.

"I'm with you there. The neighbour's cat must have gotten in while I was away. Did you leave the squirt in the car?"

That distracts her. "Oh goodness, yes! Let's go!" She more or less sprints back to the car.

They're out on the freeway to Philadelphia before she finally comments on what she saw. "That cat of your neighbour's must be quite something."

"Vile beast. It's going to end up in the river someday."

"I meant anatomically. I've never seen a cat with opposable thumbs."


	19. A Thief in the Night

_**Part IV: Mayfield**_

Gusts of wind have chased away yesterday's rain and the morning sun is dissolving last pockets of mist in the fields. White clouds chase across the sky; the trees gleam in regal gold, crimson and russet. The idyll outside, however, does little to calm his nerves. He fidgets in his seat, changes the radio station, roots through Lisa's glove compartment, and generally manages to get on her nerves. She ignores him, merely changing the radio station back to her choice, a rather lame rock and pop station.

"I don't need this," he finally mutters.

She takes a deep counting-to-ten breath. "We've been through this. If you get picked up by the police again, Tritter will crucify you."

"I won't. I don't _need_ the drugs."

"No, you're self-destructing for the fun of it," she mocks.

"I'm _not_ self-destructing. It was a mistake, okay? It won't happen again. Turn round and drive me back."

Her fingers drum on the steering wheel. "What about your neighbour's anthropomorphic pet?"

He shoots her a quick sideways glance. She hasn't mentioned the state of his apartment since her brief comment last night. He should have known better than to believe she would let it slide. "What about it?" he asks guardedly.

She sighs. "Fine! Be pig-headed. But has it occurred to you that whoever you pissed off may have tipped Narcotics off? I refuse to believe that it's a coincidence that you got arrested the same night that someone vandalised your place."

"It couldn't be that this 'someone' had nothing to do with my arrest, but took advantage of my absence to do a bit of re-decorating?"

She doesn't deign to reply to that. "Look, I don't know what you did to your cat friend, but ..."

"Maybe I didn't _do_ anything?" he suggests.

" _But_ ," she continues, "someone who is screwed-up enough to collect and spread a whole load of cat crap around your apartment to make a point probably won't baulk at setting you up the next time. _Next_ time you could get arrested for something you _didn't_ do."

He is sorely tempted to inform her that the screwed-up person is someone she once screwed, but he doesn't want to open that can of worms.

They turn into the alley that leads to Mayfield. It's the third time he's here, but the stark grey building in the distance looks every bit as threatening as it did the first time, when he'd been trailing Lisa and Wilson. It makes the Maudsley seem like the Last Homely House in comparison. Even when he shuts his eyes, the feeling of dread that assails him won't ebb away; far the opposite, in fact.

He rubs his right thigh, the non-existent one. "I don't need a detox. It's only been - what? - three weeks or so."

Her lips tighten. "Let Dr Nolan decide," she says.

"Hey, I'm a doctor, too. I'm quite capable of ...,"

"Dr Nolan," she says unbendingly, "knows more about your addiction than you do."

"Based on Wilson's objective account?" he sneers.

She takes her eyes off the road at that. "He was your therapist. Didn't he tell you?"

No, the sneaky bastard didn't.

"You spent about four months in Mayfield, six years ago," she explains.

That must have been the out-of-state detox that his fellows mentioned. He should, of course, have made the connection to Mayfield. Considering that Wilson seems to have been managing most of his major life decisions, it makes sense that he detoxed in a place of Wilson's choice. He mentally scrolls through yesterday's meeting with Wilson and Nolan (was it really only yesterday? It seems ages ago ...), but comes up with nothing that could have wised him up to the fact that he's no stranger to Nolan. Either he was too focused on Wilson to notice the signs or the shrink really is _that_ good at subterfuge.

"I don't need therapy," he says. "It's a waste of time."

It certainly was at the Maudsley; after that he'd never gone to the therapist he'd been referred to as an out-patient, and he'd been fine. Besides, just the thought of therapy sessions with someone who will not only spout the usual mumbo-jumbo, but who'll also claim a knowledge of and an insight into past issues that he himself can't recall gives him the heebie-jeebies. His nausea increases to the point that he starts making bets with himself as to whether Lisa will reach the parking lot before he upchucks all over her car mats.

She does. He gets out and leans against the car with both hands planted on the roof, drawing in long breaths of fresh air. Lisa goes to the boot and takes out his backpack.

When she comes round and drops it at his feet he straightens up to tower over her, saying, "I'm not doing this. You can't make me." The slanting sunlight highlights his sweaty fingerprints on the car's roof.

Her face is worried, anxious. She draws a hand through her hair, expelling a long breath of defeat. Now that he knows that she used to be his boss, he can't help wondering how their interactions at work used to function, for whenever he digs in his heels, she caves. It's another item to add to his mental list of 'Things to Ask Wilson' - he'd only got in the car this morning in the first place because he has nothing better to do, and going to Mayfield will give him access to Wilson on an everyday basis. Now, confronted with the looming edifice, _that_ prospect doesn't seem enough of an incentive to get him to go through the heavy oaken front doors.

She chews on her lower lip, engaged in some sort of mental argument with herself. Finally she snaps out of it and says, "Go in and talk to Nolan. After that, if you decide not to go through with it, then ...,"

"I'm deciding here and now! I wanna go home!" He casts around for the next bus stop - if she won't drive him back, he'll get back on his own.

" _Then_ ," she continues with emphasis, "I'll take you back _and_ write you a scrip."

That gets his attention. "For what?" he asks suspiciously.

"Vicodin."

What the hell is she playing at? He looks down at her tipping his head back slightly, which has the advantage of slanting half his face out of her line of vision (although to her it must seem as though he's looking at her down his nose), as he tries to gauge her mood.

Guilty: check.  
Worried: check.  
Insane: possibly.  
Stupid: no. _Definitely_ not.

Then why is she offering to write him a scrip? Chances are that he'll refuse to stay after talking with Nolan, and he'll definitely hold her to her bargain - she _knows_ that. Which means that she's reckoning with having to write him a scrip. Which in turn means that she was planning to write him a scrip all along, otherwise she wouldn't be getting herself into this position.

He (sort of) gets why she would consider writing him scrips a viable option - from her point of view it's preferable to his scoring drugs on the streets and getting picked up by Tritter. Tritter, so he has gathered, is her idea of Hitler's reincarnation. The question is, why does she think he'll take the risk of returning to his wicked ways within Tritter's radius of destruction when, _if_ he was considering continuing his casual drug use, all he need do is wait till he gets to Seattle where he is unlikely to be victimised by the local cops?

She thinks he'll be back on the streets scoring drugs because she expects the worst of him. And that hurts. Not that her opinion bothers him - once he's in Seattle she'll be history - but all these preconceptions that aren't based on what he is, but what he used to be, are a total pain in the ass.

"What makes you think I want a scrip?" he asks coldly.

She sighs. "You went through the drawer with my papers last night. It only contains my personal documents, my cheques and my prescription pad. My passport is boring, so either you were out to forge cheques in my name (which I doubt) or you wanted my prescription pad."

He remembers. He'd been unable to sleep, so he'd finally got up and migrated into the living room. He hadn't dared to turn on the television for fear of waking her or Rachel, so he had tried to hack into her computer. That, however, had proved well-nigh impossible because he knows too little about her to figure out her password. So, instead, he'd started going through her personal files, the ones in which she keeps all the details of her career to date, and had spent an amusing hour or so updating his knowledge of her career moves. She must have been quite something in her youth. He'd been immersed in reading her exceedingly pushy, self-advertising and naive application to PPTH when he'd chanced to look up at the wall where her High School Diploma hung framed above her desk. And that was when it had struck him: her CV didn't add up. According to her application she was born in 1965, and was therefore thirty-one in 1996 when she applied for the job at PPTH. That, however, would have made her twenty when she graduated high school in 1985, a contradiction in and of itself considering her over-achieving nature.

He'd started rooting around for personal documents that would prove her age, and he'd soon found the drawer with the passport and the prescription pad. And, yes, he'd been hovering over the prescription pad, turning it in his hands when she had walked in, but he wouldn't have ... ( _Or would he? ... No, he isn't_ that _desperate_.) When she'd asked what he was up to, he hadn't answered because he hadn't wanted her to know that he'd discovered something interesting that made potential blackmail material, not until he'd scoped out the hows, whereofs and whys of the age-remix she'd been indulging in. Instead, he'd slunk back to the guest room looking guilty as hell.

He gets what that must have looked like - the junkie, whose supply was confiscated by the police and who can't afford to go back to his old haunts for fear of running into the cops again, helping himself to a stray prescription pad the way he has done in the past. (He remembers the court notes of the 'Tritter case' mentioning forged prescriptions.)

Nevertheless, he hasn't done anything - well, not _much_ \- to earn her distrust, so he'll just head back to Trenton, get someone to clean up his place, and then ...

He opens his mouth to tell her that he's taking off when her face, soft (for a change) with desperation, registers. Her eyes are shimmering, and he can see himself reflected in them, small and distorted. And for a moment he sees himself as she sees him: an idiot who can't keep away from the drugs that once ruined his life, who dumps her only to come whining for help the moment he falls foul of the law, who abuses the trust she puts in him when she brings him into her home by trying to steal her prescription pad. True, he isn't guilty of the latter crime, but the rest is pretty much accurate, so he can't really blame her for assuming the worst. Anyone with a smidgen of sense would have left him in his crapped-up apartment in Trenton. In fact, they wouldn't have come at all, but sent a lawyer. (He's grateful now that she came, because a lawyer, unacquainted with the facts, could hardly have grasped the situation sufficiently to bail him out so quickly.) Hell, any normal woman getting a call like that from her felonious ex would have deleted the call from the answering machine and got on with her life. Felonious, _violent_ ex.

Okay, that _does_ make her stupid, insanely stupid. But he owes her, and although she's overly concerned, some of her arguments can't be refuted, and since he's here already he may as well confront Nolan.

Doesn't mean he can't mess with her head. "Okay, one hour with Nolan, and then I get the scrip and a ride home."

"Fine. Let's go," she says and strides off, clearly wanting to get well inside before he changes his mind.

* * *

Belinda sticks her head through the door, breaking into his reverie. "Dr Cuddy and Mr Barnes, sir."

"Thank you. Send them in, please." Nolan quickly gathers his thoughts, shaking his head as though to rid it of the fluff of old memories. He has been distracted ever since Dr Cuddy called early in the morning asking whether she could bring Greg in. Distracted and conflicted. He can't very well refuse Greg. Wrong; he _could_ , but if Greg were sent somewhere else, would they be able to help him? It isn't that Mayfield and its staff are unique, but they do have the advantage of prior experience with Greg, who now that he has authentic amnesia on top of his natural resistance to therapy, is definitely a psychiatrist's worst case scenario. Oh, other institutes will be salivating at the idea of getting him as a patient - total retrograde amnesia without any other impairment is an exceedingly rare condition - but helping him would be a secondary aim on their agenda. The question is whether James will make any sort of progress once Greg is under the same roof.

Dr Cuddy and Greg enter, Dr Cuddy striding in front, Greg trailing behind with a scowl on his face. Rising to greet them, Nolan suppresses a sigh; after all, it isn't as though he expected Greg to be enthusiastic about another stay at Mayfield. He extends a hand to Dr Cuddy. "Good morning, Dr Cuddy. Good morning, ...?" he hesitates. "What would you like me to call you?"

"Pete will be fine," Greg says ungraciously. He sits down, stretches out his legs, crosses his ankles, folds his arms over his chest and stares at Nolan challengingly.

Nolan sits back in turn and interlaces his fingers over his stomach, smiling slightly. "Before we begin, a few formalities. Pete, do you have any sort of medical insurance? Travel insurance or the like?"

"He's covered by PPTH's medical insurance policy for employees," Dr Cuddy interjects. Both Greg and Nolan stare at her. She gives them a twisted smile. "When I employed him after the infarction the board consented to terms giving him lifelong medical coverage regardless of his employment status. I told them he'd sue the hospital for medical negligence if they didn't agree."

"That was very thoughtful of you," Nolan remarks. He wonders how she'd felt about providing for him after he nearly killed her.

Dr Cuddy snorts. "It was self-protection. It ensured that if I did feel like firing him, worry about his medical care wouldn't influence my decision."

During therapy Greg had once described Dr Lisa Cuddy as a guilt-ridden, trigger-happy idealist. It had sounded paradoxical, but listening to her describe how she obtained a major lifelong benefit for her employee expressly to facilitate firing him gives Nolan an idea of the complex edifices she constructs to reconcile her impulsive actions with her conscience. Nonetheless, whatever her reasons may have been, it takes care of the greatest obstacle to Greg House's re-admission to Mayfield.

"Great. Then, whatever the course of treatment we agree upon today, we can be sure that funding will not be a problem," he says jovially.

"We won't," Greg says. Nolan looks at him questioningly. " _Agree_ , I mean. I let you talk for an hour and then I'm outta here."

Nolan looks at Dr Cuddy; on the phone she'd said that Greg had consented to treatment at Mayfield.

She rolls her eyes. "He's being difficult," she says.

"I understood that you'd agreed to treatment for what may possibly be a relapse," Nolan says carefully to Greg.

Greg shows the enthusiasm of a high school junior who has been dragged into detention. "She promised me a scrip if I sat through this session, so ... " He shrugs nonchalantly.

Nolan stares once more at Lisa, who takes a deep breath, closes her eyes for two seconds and then opens them again. "That is correct," she says, enunciating each word with precision.

He has had dealings with any number of indifferent, callous, crazy or plain stupid family and friends of addicts, so he wouldn't have thought that after over twenty years as a therapist the behaviour of a so-called friend would still have the capacity to surprise him, but if it was Dr Cuddy's goal to ensure a total lack of cooperation on Greg's part, then she could hardly have done a better job. It is doubtful whether Greg ever _intended_ to agree to a longer stint of therapy, but under the present conditions - the promise of a scrip after this session (if one can now call it such) - any motivation that he, Nolan, succeeds in creating will be nipped in the bud. Greg will leg it out of here at the end of his hour, pick up his scrip and disappear forever.

"Pete, would you leave us alone for a moment, please?" Nolan asks. He's unwilling to let Greg out of his sight, but if he is to have any sort of productive session with him, then he needs to sideline Dr Cuddy first.

Greg gets up more than willingly. The moment the door closes behind him Nolan leans forward.

"Dr Cuddy, let's not beat around the bush. You are palming _your_ problem off on me. You're bringing Greg here so that you can tell yourself that you've done your duty, and if Greg refuses to stay, then you'll pretend to yourself that it's either his fault for being an obstinate pig or mine for being bad at my job."

She sits up straight and raises a delicate eyebrow. "Greg ... _Pete_ is not my problem, and I have no duty or obligation towards him. I bailed him out of Trenton PD and I'm bringing him here because I _choose_ to do so, not because I am morally obliged to help him in any way. He was reasonably willing to give the matter a try when we got moving this morning, but the moment we reached Mayfield he baulked. The only way I could get him to enter at all was by promising him the scrip."

He's puzzled at that. Greg did, after all, arrive here in her company. "Dr Cuddy, what exactly is the nature of your present relationship with Greg?"

"There is no relationship," she answers flatly. "He phoned last night because he got arrested, needed a lawyer, and couldn't reach anyone else."

"And despite the absence of any sort of obligation you went to Trenton yourself to pick him up."

She draws a hand through her hair. "I didn't mean to, but when I phoned Trenton PD to find out what he'd done, Detective Tritter took my call." She twists a lock of hair around her finger. "He underestimated Tritter the first time he ran into him and he's underestimating him again, but this time Tritter has the advantage of knowing what he's up against, whereas Pete has no clue whatsoever. I had to get him out of there before he put his big foot into it." She looks at him imploringly. "You got him to stay the last time for detox and therapy. Can't you ...?"

"After your incautious offer that may be difficult. I remember talking to you a long time ago about the nature of interventions, and I'm reasonably confident that I mentioned that enabling the abuser to obtain drugs or to pursue his habit is not conducive to a successful intervention." He manages to keep his tone mild, but he'd like to take the woman by the shoulders and give her a good shake.

Dr Cuddy sits up and stiffens. "Who says this is an intervention? An intervention presupposes that those planning it have some sort of Damocles sword that they can dangle over the addict's head: the withdrawal of love, employment, friendship, financial security, what have you. I have _nothing_ , no leverage, no hold on him whatsoever. To him, I'm just ... some woman he dated for a short while."

She manages a good imitation of cool indifference, but under her level tone there's the brittleness of glass shards, and for a moment Nolan allows himself to pity her for what she must be going through. He has seldom witnessed cases where the emotional involvement that drove an addict's friend or family member to drag him or her to Mayfield was not reciprocated in some form or other by the addict himself, boosting his motivation and facilitating treatment. This however, could be such a case: the gravitational force that pulls Dr Cuddy towards Greg is based on their pre-amnesia years and is hence one-sided. Greg, for his part, has cut himself loose (metaphorically and surgically) and is floating through space, free, but also uncontrolled.

Dealing with Greg will be complicated enough as it is, but Dr Cuddy adds an additional challenge to a constellation that is already giving him a headache. With respect to James, her proximity to Mayfield and her willingness to get involved in his process have been exceedingly beneficial. That there is someone from his past who is willing to let bygones be bygones and accept him even when his perfect façade displays cracks has been an enormous boost to James, as have the structure and discipline that Dr Cuddy's family life gives those weekends that he's allowed to leave Mayfield. Whether she'll be of the same benefit to Greg is doubtful. He, Nolan, is all in favour of exploring the possibilities that a relationship can offer even if that means risking disappointment and hurt, but he has heard a little from James about Dr Cuddy's spectacular break-up with Greg, and if even half of what James implies is true, then from Greg's point of view a renewal of intimacies is not to be desired. He has also heard and read quite a bit about Greg's even more spectacular reaction to that break-up, which in turn makes him wonder why Dr Cuddy should desire a reprise of the relationship at all.

"But you have been in a relationship of sorts since Greg returned to the US," he probes. Dr Cuddy nods, biting her lower lip. "Why? There must have been a reason why you ended the relationship four years ago. You've known Greg for a long time, so it couldn't have been disenchantment or surprise at how difficult he can be. That reason, whatever it was, must surely still have some validity."

There's a return of confidence in her mien. "I had a major health scare: we - all of us - thought I had a renal carcinoma that had metastasized into my lungs. House panicked and went MIA until the night before the supposed tumour was to be removed, and when he did turn up he was stoned. So, I decided I didn't need a relationship with someone who needed drugs to face pain or responsibility. It was stupid - one vicodin, and _I_ panicked."

It's a little too glib, too rehearsed. "And other than that you had no issues?"

She taps her forehead lightly with the tips of her fingers. "We had our disagreements like everyone has, but before that we were fine." At his unbelieving look she adds, "Yes, he'd mess with my head, I'd get mad, and he'd make up for it somehow, but it was no big deal. It wasn't as though I'd been expecting anything else."

She's obviously in some sort of denial, and he has to jerk her out of it. "Dr Cuddy," he says conjuringly, leaning forward over his desk, "no one who is in a fulfilling relationship - certainly not a woman with your life experience - dumps an addict because he relapsed and took one or two vicodin. You knew he was an addict, you knew he might relapse, you had experience with him during his addictive phase, and _none_ of that stopped you from getting involved. Indeed, you were not averse to an involvement when Greg was at the height of his addiction."

"I told you, I panicked," she says defensively.

"You had enough time afterwards to reverse the decision you made on the spur of the moment, and from what I hear, you have no problems reversing bad relationship decisions or admitting to mistakes. You could not have been a happy woman within that relationship, Dr Cuddy, or you would not have stuck to your decision to abandon it, and with it, Greg."

Her teeth mangling her lower lip, she stares out of the window at something only she can see. One hand moves up to her neck to finger her necklace. When she returns her gaze to him, the walls - some of them - are down.

"That was precisely the problem: with House I couldn't break up without breaking _him_ , because for him there was nothing else any more. There was just - _us_. Stacy - his previous girlfriend - once complained that even when she was dating House she was alone; when I was dating House I was _never_ alone even when he wasn't there, because everything I did affected him somehow. He clung to me, saw me as some sort of saviour. At first I didn't realise what that meant; I was simply relieved that if the worst came to the worst, I'd have enough power over him to stop him from jeopardising both our careers. But then ...," she murmurs, her lips trembling, "but then, it became a burden. What if something went wrong? What if something happened to me?

"I banished the thought until Wilson discovered a mass in my kidney. I promptly started making arrangements for my daughter: setting up a trust fund, arranging for my sister to become her guardian, and so on. I wasn't happy at the thought of having to leave her, but I knew she'd be fine." She grimaces and amends, "As fine as a toddler can be under the circumstances. But there was nothing I could do for House, and I knew that if I died - at that point it didn't seem an 'if', but a 'when' - he'd lose it completely, spiral out of control, break apart - which he started doing right then and there, only I didn't know it yet."

He shifts awkwardly and clears his throat, wondering whether he should offer her a tissue. But in a moment she has caught herself and is trying to smile, even though the effect is pathetic rather than reassuring.

"But you didn't die," Nolan says, "and what you did sent House into a spiral as surely as your death would have done. Couldn't you, _shouldn't_ you have rethought your decision then?"

"I would have; in fact, I wouldn't even have ended it, but House was about to propose," Dr Cuddy says. Her statement doesn't make sense, and from what he knows of Greg it seems improbable. Although Greg had no issue with long-term commitments, his role models for matrimony - his parents and Wilson - were not of the type to make the proposition attractive to him.

At his look of disbelief she smiles wryly and explains, "My previous boyfriend proposed after we'd been dating for a year. I knew House would do the same, not because he was wild about getting shackled, but to test whether I trusted him as much as I did Lucas. Yes, he's competitive that way. There were omens: he accompanied me to a wedding that he could easily have avoided in order to scope out what kind of a do _I'd_ like - Mariachi music, a white dress, and so on -, he started talking about the relationship as long-term, he ... took an interest in my daughter's education, he tried out domesticity and how far he could push me at home. I registered all that subconsciously and some part of me knew that it wouldn't be long ...,"

"If you didn't want to marry him, you could have refused his proposal," Nolan points out.

She taps her fingertips on the desk in front of her. "I _did_ want to marry him - before that. His addiction hadn't worried me before, because I'd always assumed that he'd die before I did. But then death suddenly seemed possible, and marriage wasn't an option anymore, because once I was married to him, he'd have expected me to name him Rachel's guardian in case of my death - again, mostly a trust issue, not because he was especially keen to do the job - which meant that if I died after _marrying_ him, I'd be leaving Rachel in the care of a spiralling addict. That simply wasn't an option. Telling him that I couldn't marry him although I'd been prepared to marry Lucas wasn't an option either. It didn't leave very many options."

"Did you talk to him about this?" Nolan feels obliged to ask, knowing the answer.

Dr Cuddy snorts. "He'd have withdrawn into his shell of hurt, mocking the idea of proposing to me and pretending he didn't care either way, and then he'd have pushed me away so I wouldn't be able to hurt him anymore. It wouldn't have changed the ultimate outcome. Talking," she adds with a grimace, "was never our strong point."

"So," he says, "what do you believe has changed?"

She gives a short laugh. "Now he couldn't care less whether I die or not! ... No," she amends almost immediately, "that's not fair. He would care if I died, but he'd get over it. I'm no longer the proverbial straw that he's clutching at."

"But that could change if the relationship intensified and continued," Nolan points out.

Dr Cuddy shakes her head. "I don't think so. He's still broody and crude and intense and, oh, just generally a pain in the ass, but he doesn't exude this deep pessimism any more, this, 'karma is out to get me, so I may as well speed up the process by mucking up as much as I can of my own accord'. He was never a happy-go-lucky sort of person, even in school, but ..." She smiles at some memory. "Yes, that's what he reminds me of: what he was like in school."

"You knew him in school?" Again, he's honestly surprised.

"Not very well. He got expelled soon after I started pre-med."

"Hmm. I didn't know that."

She shrugs. "I doubt it's relevant."

"Everything is relevant to Greg."

"I mean, I doubt it's relevant _now_. He really has total retrograde amnesia - he recognises no one, not even Wilson, and he can't find his way around PPTH, where he worked for over a dozen years."

He musters her. "But it matters to you. It influenced your decision to employ him, and ..."

"I'm not your patient," she says politely, but firmly. She narrows her eyes at him. "You said we shouldn't beat around the bush, so let's get down to the nitty-gritty." She's all business woman now, the meltdown of the last ten minutes wiped away. "You want me to stay away from him."

"I think that some distance would be beneficial."

She hesitates. "If you can get him to stay for treatment, then I won't try to see him of my own accord. But if he asks me to come and visit, I won't say no. I'm not going to let him believe I abandoned him."

He has no intention of asking Dr Cuddy to lie or evade for the sake of his therapy concept - either Greg agrees of his own accord not to see her or he, Nolan, will have to accept defeat in that respect - but it's interesting that she should think he'd ask it of her. "You have abandoned him before _and_ gone behind his back," he says, provoking her on purpose.

"Yes," she replies, "but it never really worked out well, and it's one thing having to pay the price for my own mistakes. It's quite another if I have to pay for yours." She rises. "If that's all, Dr Nolan, ...?"

He nods. "Will you please send Greg, sorry, Pete in?"

Greg ambles in a moment after Dr Cuddy leaves the room, his darting eyes belying his casual demeanour. Last time he was focused on James, drinking in every movement and every change of mien; this time he's absorbing his surroundings. He spurns the comfortable visitor's chair opposite Nolan; instead, he pulls up a hardback chair, spins it around so that the back faces Nolan, and straddles it, folding his arms over the top of the back and leaning his chin on the back of his hands. Nolan can feel the heat radiating off his stare.

"So you were my shrink," he observes. "What's it like to be confronted with your biggest failure?"

"I wouldn't consider you a failure," Nolan says mildly, although he can feel his hackles rising.

"No? A massive relapse and self-destructive behaviour culminating in attempted manslaughter. Not my definition of a successful therapy."

"All addicts relapse." He lifts his hand to gesture at Greg. "You're still alive five years later. Given your prognosis on admission, I wouldn't talk of a total failure."

Greg grins and waggles a finger at him. "A negative prognosis on admission, and criteria for measuring a patient's progress which are as soft and squishy as your secretary's funbags. See, that's why psychiatry isn't an exact science but a playground for New Age gurus."

"What would _you_ consider a positive outcome?" Nolan asks.

"The bottom line, even for you, should be that a patient accepts himself the way he is. I consented to a procedure that eradicated my identity. What clearer proof do you need that you fucked it up?"

"We can only offer our help. It's up to you whether you take it or not."

"That's right! If the patient doesn't recover, it's his fault; if he does, it's a therapeutic success. Wilson isn't exactly one of your success stories either, is he? Stuck in here for over five months - because of alcoholism. Even I was out faster."

"James's problems can't be reduced to alcoholism."

"You always have an excuse, don't you?" He stretches out a demanding hand. "My case file."

Nolan is prepared for this. The file is already lying at the top of his pile of current files. He picks it up and hands it to Greg, who takes it, his raised eyebrows indicating his surprise at the easy victory. After flicking through it his face scrunches up in disgust.

"This is worthless!" he opines, sending the file spinning onto the desk with a flick of his wrist.

"Those are your medical records detailing your patient history, all tests carried out on you in Mayfield, your diagnosis, all therapeutic measures that were initiated, all medication given to you, a chronological chart of your progress, ..."

"The notes on my therapy sessions have been removed."

"They weren't removed because they were never in your case file," Nolan says blandly. "My therapy notes are a subjective agglomeration of my impressions during a session, not an objective medical log - as I'm sure you'll agree. As such, they have no business in a case file that may get passed on to another physician during the course of a patient's treatment."

"You don't intend to give them to me," Greg surmises.

"No."

Greg's eyes flicker around the room once again, coming to rest on the three filing cabinets behind Nolan's desk. Then his gaze returns to Nolan, appraising, calculating. "What do you want from me in return for the information in my therapy notes?"

" _My_ therapy notes _about_ you," Nolan corrects automatically. "I want something _for_ you. I want you to talk to me."

The fingers of Greg's right hand tap a complicated rhythm on his right leg; the slightly hollow sound proceeding from his prosthesis, where a healthy man would have sound-absorbing muscle matter, is intensely disconcerting. "Don't try to sell this as a favour to me or my, what do you call it, mental hygiene. You're blackmailing me."

"I'm offering you a fair bargain. Those notes are as much a mirror of my soul as they are of yours. I have never, ever shown a patient the notes I make during therapy sessions, and I have only shown excerpts to colleagues when we were involved with the same patient. I won't release something as sensitive as that without ensuring that it won't cause more damage than good." He pauses, gauging Greg's mood. "I need you to talk to me, so that I can assess your mental state and make sure that what you find out won't send you into a tailspin."

Greg leans back with his hands clasped loosely around the back of the chair. "I don't need therapy. I'm fine. Seems I was in pain and an addict, but no leg - no pain. Problem solved. As for my past, I can't remember it, so it can't bother me." He catches Nolan's disbelieving look, so he adds, "My interest in my past is academic in nature, like people who research their genealogies hoping that their ancestors were members of the European nobility rather than deported convicts."

"Then why pursue it?" Nolan asks reasonably. "Greg, ..." Greg stiffens, so Nolan quickly corrects himself. "Sorry, Pete. Four years ago your past seemed so worthless to you that you decided to wipe it out in a manner that could easily have turned you into a permanent resident of an institution like this one."

That gets to Greg. His eyes slide away, indicating a direct hit. This must be something that has been bothering him too - the thought that with the procedure he endangered his independence - for although Greg carried risky behaviour to extraordinary levels, generally showing a complete disregard for his physical safety, he was always wary of compromising his mental abilities.

Nolan takes a deep breath. "Besides," he continues, "after years of living without an identity, you have suddenly been bombarded with facts about your past, turning your perception of yourself upside down. Even if you had never been in need of therapy before, your recent past as an amnesiac more than qualifies you for it."

"My peg leg also qualifies me for the Paralympics, but I don't intend to participate." He pretends to give the matter a moment of serious thought. "Not _next_ year, but I'm considering training for 2020. Why don't we set a similar target for therapy?"

Nolan decides to abandon the route of persuasive reasoning and return to the well-trodden path of coercion. "You want my notes - talk to me." He props his elbows on the desk and leans his chin on his folded fingers, giving Greg a challenging look.

"Fine." Greg says abruptly. "How many sessions?"

"That depends on you. As many as we need to get you to talk."

Greg stiffens. "You don't expect me to consent to a bargain where _you_ get to decide whether I've fulfilled my end of it."

"You don't expect _me_ to consent to a bargain where you get what you want without delivering the goods yourself. If I agree to a certain number of sessions without making any stipulations regarding your participation, you'll sit here silent as the grave."

Greg's eyes slide back to the filing cabinet.

"Don't bother to rack your brains about how you can break into my office and steal your case notes," Nolan says. "They're in a safe."

"I'm hurt!" Greg says, but he seems amused. His fingers tap a Bach fugue on the back of the chair. "In-patient or out-patient?"

Nolan chooses his words with care. "For therapeutic purposes out-patient treatment should normally suffice: as far as the opiates go, we're probably dealing with a lapse, not a full-blown relapse, and while your amnesia is undoubtedly fascinating, it hardly justifies your presence here 24/7. We do, however, need to consider the legal ramifications of last night's incident. No judge will pull you out of in-patient treatment in order to clap you into jail because of one bottle of Percocet, and in-patient treatment will boost your defence enormously should the matter land in court."

Greg leans back. "So my choice is either definite incarceration here or possible incarceration in Princeton."

"I wouldn't call it incarceration. As long as I can detect no immediate threat to your own health or that of others there's no reason why you shouldn't get privileges."

"Do I get to be on the same ward as Wilson?"

Nolan can't suppress a smile. "It's my aim to provide treatment for James and for you, not to supply you with a playground on which you can rehearse your plans for world dominance."

Greg's mouth twitches in turn.

"But there's no reason why you shouldn't see each other during recreation time," Nolan adds, reasonably sure that sooner or later he'll regret making this concession. "And I'll have the piano brought down from Ward 6. There's no one there at the moment who can play."

"Oh, you're spoiling me!" Greg says dramatically. "How can I refuse such an offer?"

Nolan rises. "Let's get the paperwork done and inform Dr Cuddy."

Greg gives a brief nod and disentangles his legs from the chair. Nolan holds the door open for him. Dr Cuddy is sitting on a chair in the hallway nursing a cup of coffee that is untouched so far. She looks up hopefully when they come out.

Greg holds out his hand. "Scrip," he says.

Dr Cuddy's face falls. She leans down to place her cup on the ground, and then digs around in her purse, avoiding Nolan's eyes as she pulls out a pen and a pad. Rolling his eyes, Nolan pushes Greg's hand aside.

"He's my patient now, Dr Cuddy, so from now on I'm the only person who'll be writing prescriptions for him," he says. Dr Cuddy's head jerks up and she glances quickly from him to Greg for confirmation.

"Spoilsport," Greg mutters.

"That's ... good news," she says in as level a tone as she can manage, but there's unmistakeable relief in her eyes.

"I'm taking him to admissions and then to his ward," Nolan informs her.

"Okay." She turns to Greg, whose eyes are meandering all over the hall. "Send me a list of the things you need and I'll have them picked up from your apartment. Oh, and I'll organise someone to clean it up."

"Thanks," Greg says awkwardly. He glances at her briefly before jerking his head at Nolan. "Let's go before I run for the hills."

Dr Cuddy puts a hesitant hand on his arm. "Good luck, Pete," she says, and then she turns away and walks rapidly down the corridor towards the exit.

Greg tips his head sideways as he watches her go. When she disappears round the corner he straightens up. Noticing Nolan observing him he shrugs, saying, "She's got a great ass."

"So have I," Nolan says. "Follow me."


	20. Barrels out of Bonds

"What have you planned for the coming weekend?" Nolan asks as the session draws to a close.

Wilson smiles, confident about this part of his agenda. "Oh, just normal stuff: shopping on Saturday with Allison - I desperately need some new shoes - and on Sunday I'm taking Rachel to the zoo."

"So," says Nolan in that mildly curious tone that never fails to put Wilson on his guard, "how is your relationship with Allison progressing?"

"It's not ...," Wilson begins, then falters. He gives it a second go. "We're taking it slow at the moment, seeing whether it's what we both want."

Nolan nods his head rhythmically. "Okay," he says. "Any specific reason for the change in pace?"

Yes, there is a very specific reason and it answers to the name of Gregory House. When Allison visited him a few days after the PPTH Anniversary Gala, the conversation turning to House (as was to be expected), it soon became obvious that she blamed House mostly for his, Wilson's, present state. According to Allison, his problem was his total dependence on House, a trait House had nursed and cherished in order to further his own interests; House's reappearance in his life was thus a pestilence that needed to be combatted with their combined efforts.

It isn't that he doesn't agree with Allison on some level: there's no doubt that his friendship with House had a negative influence on some of his behavioural patterns, and he's of one mind with her with regard to House encouraging behaviour that furthered his own plans no matter what the consequences for Wilson. (He's still angry with himself for succumbing to the influence of House's neediness after the car crash, first helping him to survive the trial and then getting actively involved in House's insane witness protection programme.) The thing is, it's one thing to question the purity of House's motives, but it's quite another to blame him for the choices that he, Wilson, made in the past. Allison may believe that House is capable of poisoning the very air he breathes, but Wilson is painfully aware that in all his sins of commission or omission there was an element of choice, and being House's friend does not exonerate him from the responsibility of the choices he made. If House managed to wake the beast in him, then only because there was one slumbering within. House is not Frankenstein, the creator of monsters; he merely reveals what lies hidden, uncovers lies, unmasks hypocrites - such as James Evan Wilson.

This difference of opinion wouldn't matter - didn't matter till now - but now there's no doubt that House is back in his life, for better or for worse, and there's no exorcism that'll drive him away until his curiosity is satisfied. And Wilson isn't exactly sad about that, because life without House isn't what Allison makes it out to be, a return to purity and innocence. It's dreary, lonely and boring. Allison, however, has decided that what he needs is House purged out of his system. This isn't exactly new: both Bonnie and Julie had been pretty much of the same opinion, even if neither of them were as decided or vociferous in expressing it. Neither of his marriages had survived his partner's disapproval of House. (Okay, he's doing it again - blaming someone, in this case his ex-wives and possibly House, for outcomes for which _he_ is mainly to blame.)

The fact of the matter is that Allison wants to fix him while _he_ doesn't want to be fixed. He has always been the strong one in a relationship, catering to the needs of a weaker partner, and no amount of therapy will ever turn him into someone who'll agree to a needy role in a relationship. Furthermore, if Allison believes that he was a passive victim of House's madness, then she's plain delusional. Yes, he often gave in, he frequently allowed House's manic energy to override his better judgment, but it was always an active decision, never a passive sliding into something he'd expressly wanted to avoid. Since his marriages didn't survive his wives' passive-aggressive disapproval of House, there's no way a relationship with Allison is likely to last if she's already openly hostile towards House at the outset.

That doesn't mean that he doesn't respect her. Quite the contrary - he's all admiration for the way she manages to focus on House's shortcomings and block out his brilliance, charisma, restless energy, dominance and vulnerability. Few people can do that, and of those only a negligible number are heterosexual women; no matter what 'type' of guy women go for, House checks at least one, if not more of their boxes. Allison's switch in attitude from 'House is a lonely, hurt child who needs my loving and cherishing care' to 'House is toxic to his environment' is somewhat extreme, but it's nothing he can't empathise with, having gone through that sort of a pendulum motion himself a few times.

It isn't quite what he intends to tell Nolan; he isn't sure how Nolan will react to his changed attitude towards House - if it is a change. He isn't really sure: it was easy to be angry with House and tell himself that in the unlikely event of House knocking at his door, he'd slam it in his face and make sure he jammed his fingers in the doorjamb while he was at it. Now that House has fallen down his chimney and is sitting in the hearth in a pile of cinders, appearing both forlorn and absurdly proud of himself at the same time, it's a lot more difficult to rid himself of him.

So he tells Nolan, "It would be a long distance relationship - New York isn't that far from Princeton, but Allison has a challenging job and I would need to take it slow. Besides, let's be honest about it - I'm not a good choice for her. Her career is taking off whereas mine is definitely stagnating. That's the sort of situation that can cause a lot of tension in a relationship, especially since I'm bound to have problems adjusting to my changed status in the professional world."

Nolan nods thoughtfully. "It's good that you're taking a realistic view of this. It's even better that you're not making any rushed decisions either way." He looks down at his notes. "Okay, that's the weekend. One more overnight pass midweek, and if all goes well, there's no reason why you shouldn't be released the Friday after."

"That's great. Umm, what about House?" He's been expecting another visit from House this week, because it seems unlikely that House will let matters rest where they are, but so far Nolan hasn't mentioned the matter at all. That is odd because if Nolan is warding House off in the belief that he, Wilson, is too vulnerable to deal with House, then that begs the question of how Nolan expects him to be able to cope with House swooping down on him the moment he is released. The second possibility, that House has lost interest, is one that he discards straightaway.

"Ah, yes, Greg. That's another matter that we need to talk about," Nolan says.

Wilson leans back. Matters they 'need' to talk about usually concern some aspect of his behaviour that Nolan considers worthy of modification.

"You may run into Greg during recreation time out on the grounds or in the common rooms," Nolan continues.

Wilson's eyebrows shoot up. Whatever he was expecting it wasn't this. "House is - what the hell is he doing here?"

"Sorry, patient confidentiality. But I thought I'd forewarn you so that you'd be prepared. That's all, really."

House is a patient again at Mayfield? Then he must have relapsed. Badly. Or slumped back into a depression. Or both.

"How long has he been here?" he asks.

Nolan lifts his hands. "Sorry, again. But feel free to ask him when you see him."

"I'm ... allowed to talk to him?"

"Sure," Nolan says, as if he hadn't been shielding him from House's verbal attacks a mere week ago.

"O-kay," he says slowly.

Recreation time has him at the window of the common room. It's a cool, blustery day with occasional showers. A few patients are jogging along the meandering paths and someone is trying to fly a kite, but all in all the grounds don't look very inviting. He's considering going to the small library on the fourth floor to read a few magazines when he spots a lone figure on one of the benches. Abruptly he turns away, grabs his coat and scarf and goes outside.

He's within a few yards of him before House looks up over his reading glasses and acknowledges his presence by giving him the briefest of nods.

"What are you doing here?" Wilson asks, irritated by House's lack of reaction. Confronted with the man in flesh and blood he is reminded that knowing House isn't just exciting or rewarding, it's also strenuous and a lot of hard work.

"Reading," House answers, his attention firmly focused on an open file in his hands.

"Don't evade. What are you doing in Mayfield?"

House gives him a sly glance. "Accessing my therapy notes. It's a sort of tit-for-tat arrangement: Nolan gets to boast that he is treating the amnesiac of the decade while I get my therapy notes." He gives the file a little shake.

Wilson gives up waiting for an 'appropriate' reaction and sits down next to him, squinting unashamedly at what House is reading. The space in the centre of each page is covered in large, loose writing in black ink, heavily underscored in at least three different colours. The wide margins are covered in notes in the same colours as the underscoring, with arrows, circles and other esoteric symbols connecting random bits to other random bits.

"Nolan's notes? Nolan's therapy notes?" So far, he hasn't noticed Nolan making complex colour-coded notes.

"Yep. Pretty useless so far."

"What do the colours mean?"

"They came without an instruction manual, but the system seems to be green for resolved issues, red for important unresolved issues, pink for less important unresolved issues, blue for relationship stuff, orange for work-related stuff, ..." He trails off, leafing through the small pile to check whether he can find any more colours.

From what Wilson can see, there's a lot of red and blue, both colours overlapping in various places, the odd arrow in orange and a few splotches of pink. If there's any green at all, then he can't see it.

"Did you ... steal them?" he asks with a feeling of premonition.

"What do you take me for, a common thief?" House asks with mock indignation.

"A common thief knows he's subject to the same laws as everyone else. He hopes he won't get caught. You believe you're above the law, hence you don't care whether you get caught."

House scratches the side of his nose. "I'm hurt. I asked nicely and said 'please', so Nolan gave them to me."

That's never the whole story, but it's a point of minor interest. "What did you do to get put in here?"

"Who says I did anything?"

"You're never here voluntarily."

"Maybe I like it here," House says with a calculating look. "Fond memories ..."

"You have no memories!"

"Ah, got me there! But Nolan has mine, in fifteen case files like this one, and I intend to read them all." He scans three pages in quick succession. Anyone who didn't know him would assume that he's merely glancing over them. Wilson, however, is aware that each page will have left a photographic imprint in House's memory and that even as he turns to the next page his amazing mind is sorting, cataloguing and storing information, forming cross-connections to other data, creating reference points and supplying weird associations.

"Seems to have been quite the year," House murmurs, returning to a previously perused page.

"What year?" he asks, although he has a good idea which one House means.

"2009. Okay, end of 2008 onwards. My father died," he taps a mess of red and blue, "one of my fellows offs himself, and then your girlfriend ... Hang on!" Something has caught his eye. "I was in the same bus in the middle of the night coming back from a bar? Was I _doing_ your girlfriend?"

"No," Wilson says curtly. They've never, ever discussed Amber's death and its impact on their friendship. The topic is taboo and there's a Good Reason for that.

"No? Then how come you ...," his eyes flicker back to the notes, "blamed me for her death?"

"I didn't!" Wilson protests. At House's disbelieving stare he amends, "I don't now."

House leans back mustering him curiously, showing no signs of sympathy, guilt or embarrassment. On the upside, he isn't exhibiting any sort of wicked glee or malice either. He's simply curious, in a House-ian way of course, which means he'll pursue the matter, but he could just as well be discussing the results of a clinical trial for cancer medication for all the personal interest he's showing. (Contrary to what the general public believes, House has marked tells that reveal emotional involvement, and Wilson can read every one of those!) After a moment he demonstratively returns to his therapy notes, but Wilson's relief is short-lived.

"Ah, it's all here," House says, stabbing another heavily annotated page. His tongue poking out of the corner of his mouth, he re-reads the page twice, his puzzled frown morphing into a scowl. He finally looks up and shakes his head. "Multiple organ failure after amantadine poisoning because the crash trashed her kidneys. How the hell was that supposed to have been _my_ fault?"

"It wasn't," Wilson says helplessly. "I - needed someone to blame."

"And you chose me."

Wilson nods mutely. Put like that, it sounds stupid, callous and unjust. At the time, however, it had seemed logical and inevitable. House had been like an oversized baby, craving attention and throwing tantrums when he didn't get any. Getting so shit-faced that he needed to be picked up from a bar had been part of his stratagem to divert Wilson's attention from Amber back to himself. Even if nothing disastrous had happened that night, sooner or later he'd have pushed so hard that something would have given: either their friendship or his relationship with Amber. The bus accident had merely served to bundle that destructive energy ...

"Do you know how many types of crazy that is?" House asks, his eyes already on the next page.

Wilson stiffens, wondering for a brief moment whether House can read his thoughts.

"My father's death appears to have been a Cause for Joy," House remarks next, adding drily, "Why am I not surprised? ... Wait - you drugged me and kidnapped me to make me go to the funeral?"

" _Cuddy_ drugged you; I only ... okay, it was _my_ idea. You didn't want to go, but we thought you should, for your mother's sake and to get some closure. You and your dad ... didn't get along very well," he ends lamely. The funeral trip isn't something he's proud of in retrospect, although House is hardly in a position to claim high moral ground with regard to incapacitating kith and kin with drugs.

"That must be the understatement of the year," House quips, tracing a finger down the page. "Regular sessions with a belt; ice baths whenever he caught me lying; whole nights shut out on the back porch." He reads each item off the sheet as though it was a patient's symptoms. "Oh yeah, and a broken arm after getting pushed down the stairs."

Wilson is happy that he's seated, he's that dizzy. "I ... I never knew. You only told me he wouldn't speak with you one whole summer."

"Really?" House turns the page. "Ah, that's here too. It doesn't seem I minded _that_ too much." It's only underlined in pink.

Wilson can't detect any emotion in House's face or voice other than pleasure at having found that stray item one page on. Other than that he's completely indifferent. They could be discussing the relative merits of pizza as opposed to Chinese takeaway for all he seems to care.

"Why didn't you ever tell me? I'd never have made you go to the bloody funeral if I'd known!"

"How am I supposed to know _what_ I told you and _why_?" House asks reasonably. He shrugs. "I assume that I didn't consider it any of your business."

"But now you do?"

House considers this. "Now it makes no difference," he finally says.

Wilson stares into the distance, watching a lone maple leaf spiral to the ground as he contemplates the present state of affairs. One would sooner expect a politician to tell the truth than House to divulge anything pertaining to his past. He briefly ponders whether this unprecedented openness, with House practically reading aloud from his therapy notes, could be the result of whatever medication Nolan has prescribed, only to discard the notion: he has seen House drunk, high, drunk _and_ high, disoriented, maudlin, and sentimental, but never so completely out of the loop that he'd volunteer personal information of such heavy calibre.

And then he understands. "That isn't _you_ ," he says obscurely, gesturing at the file on House's lap.

House snaps the file shut, displaying the label stuck on its cover: _House, Gregory_.

"That's me," he says grinning, "and I have the fingerprints to prove it." He waggles his fingertips annoyingly under Wilson's nose.

"It isn't 'you' as in: you don't see yourself as Gregory House. You're studying it like it was a patient file."

"It _is_ a patient file. What else is it supposed to be?" House says, his voice raised in irritation.

"You don't care about what you did or what happened to you!"

Cool blue eyes appraise him. "No, I don't. Why should I? I can't remember any of this crap, and I sure as hell don't intend to let it ruin my day."

Wilson wants to shake him and yell, _You_ _ **have**_ _to care! That's twenty years of shared history you're holding in your hands, trials, pain and sometimes even laughter, and you're treating it like an article in bloody_ Modern Psychology _!_

But he merely asks, "Why are you reading the notes if they're irrelevant to your present state of mind?"

"Because it pisses me off that everyone claims to know more about my past and my screwed-up personality than I do." He tips his head to the side, his frown deepening. "Someone should teach the man how to use word processing. His handwriting sucks."

Wilson considers what House said about wanting to know about himself. "Some of your stuff is in storage at a unit near Princeton. If you're interested in rooting around in it, I could take you there." Anyone with the slightest sense of self-preservation would hand House the key to the storage unit and leave him to his own devices.

"Stuff? What kind of stuff?" House asks, his face lighting up.

Wilson tries to remember what he brought to the storage unit three years ago. "Some of your furniture, books, pictures, a few knick-knacks."

"Great - let's go!" House says, rising.

"Wait! You need a day pass from Nolan," he says firmly.

"Day pass - stay pass. Let's elope," House suggests, waggling his eyebrows at Wilson.

"And spend our honeymoon in a storage unit. No thanks!" And for the first time that afternoon he risks a tiny smile.

* * *

"You're the candidate in a game show," House says.

They're in Wilson's car on the highway towards Princeton. House has a cigarette stuck behind his ear, but so far he hasn't lit it. Wilson has few hopes that the cause for House's reticence is the no-smoking sticker on the glove compartment. He's probably saving it for the extra psychological edge that blowing the smoke into Wilson's face will give him when he touches on something especially tricky. Like Amber. Or Wilson's deal with Tritter.

"Okay," Wilson says. There's no avoiding this probing into his psyche, disguised as an exercise in statistics, probability, chaos theory, you-name-it. If he's very, very lucky, it'll be one of those scenarios that House tried out on him before the EST, so he'll remember it while House has no idea that he's heard it before.

"The show master shows you three identical doors. Behind one is a shiny new red Ferrari, behind the other two there's a pig. If you choose the right door, you get to be owner of the Ferrari."

"One pig behind both doors or one pig behind each door?" Wilson asks, more to gain time than because it matters. He hasn't heard this one before.

"One pig behind each door," House says impatiently. "You have to choose one of the doors."

"Okay. I take the middle one. Do I own a pig now?"

"No. The door you've chosen remains closed. Instead, the show master, saying that he'd like to increase your chances of making the right choice, opens one of the other doors, revealing a pig behind it. He asks you whether you want to stick to your original choice or whether you'd like to switch to the remaining closed door. Now," House takes the cigarette from behind his ear and twiddles it around, "do you stay with the door you chose at the outset or do you take the other door?"

"Shit, this is probability, isn't it?" Wilson asks rhetorically. In school he'd totally messed up the math exam on probability. "Wait, no, it doesn't have to be." He narrows his eyes and taps the steering wheel to the rhythm of his thoughts. Then he squints over at House. "I can choose _any_ door, right, even the open one? I choose the one the show master just opened, the one with the pig."

Cool, appraising eyes bore through him. Yes, this _is_ a test. "Why?"

"Because if I win the shiny red Ferrari, you'll 'borrow' it and put it through someone's wall and it'll be impounded as evidence, so I'll be left with nothing. You don't want a pig, so it's safe. I'll call it Wilbur, move to Oklahoma with it and live happily ever after."

"Nice." House leans back and sticks the cigarette behind his ear again. "You hate Oklahoma," he says. It's difficult to say whether he's satisfied or disappointed.

"So what's the right answer?"

"If you want the Ferrari, you'd do better to switch to the remaining door."

Wilson mulls over this. "Why? Two doors left, one with a pig, the other with the Ferrari behind it. That's a fifty-fifty either way, so I may as well stick with the original door."

"Wrong. The odds are two to one that in the _first_ round you chose a door with a pig behind it, in which case the show master _has_ to take the remaining pig out of the game, and the last door hides the Ferrari. So you'd do better to switch."

"But that isn't what _you'd_ do," Wilson says. "You don't stick to the rules of probability. You take chances, so you'd stick with the door you chose first."

"Wrong. I never take chances when I can avoid it."

"Right!" Wilson says sarcastically.

"I," House continues, ignoring him, "would observe the show master. He has to know behind which door the Ferrari is hidden in order to take the right door out of the game. I'd be able to tell by his reaction whether I chose the right door or not, and based on that I'd decide whether I need to switch doors or not."

"So you want to outwit the laws of statistics and probability by including the human element in your calculations."

"There's a human element the moment there is human interaction, but the human element is _as_ predictable as any other element. It's just a question of deducing the rules that govern human behaviour and applying them to a given situation."

Wilson pulls off the freeway near Lawrence. The storage unit, a large concrete block in the middle of nowhere, exudes anonymity; two surveillance cameras eye them as the gate opens. He parks in a disability parking space in front of the unit, kills the engine and looks at House.

"Don't expect too much," he says cautiously. "You had ... _have_ a lot of stuff, and there are some very interesting things in there, but - there's practically nothing personal."

House doesn't say anything. He merely swings himself out of the car. Outside, he waits for Wilson to join him to show him the way. Wilson leads the way inside, looking around a little uncertainly. It's been a long time since he was here; after House left, he'd simply packed up his stuff haphazardly and had driven it here.

"You got a heated unit for some furniture and a heap of papers?" House exclaims when Wilson leads him to the section with the climate controlled units. "You must've really, _really_ loved me!" Blue eyes regard him quizzically, with just a note of suspicion.

"I prefer to think of it as a sign of respect for your property, specifically your couch, on which I spent many a night," Wilson says drily. "My love for _you_ died when you rejected my proposal."

That has the desired effect of distracting House from the anomalies of Wilson's storage renting habits. "You proposed ... naah, you're kidding me!"

"I'm not. I have witnesses - the workers at the restaurant where I proposed, and my then-neighbour who also witnessed the proposal. Don't your therapy files mention the matter? It was in 2010, when you were still in therapy." The loveliness of this is that it's all absolutely true, so House's in-built lie detector can't freak.

They've reached the unit now; he bends to open the padlock , and then pulls up the rolling door while House stands aloof, watching him struggle as the door jams halfway up. When he's finally got it open all the way, House peers inside.

"It's dark!" he says unnecessarily.

Wilson flicks on a light switch next to the door. A bulb on the ceiling casts meagre light on stacked crates, shelves with boxes on them and furniture shrouded in dust sheets. It's all rather impersonal and dismal, rather like the jetsam of a foreclosure sale. There's just one shelf with a few knick-knacks that had turned up after Wilson had sealed the last crate - mementos that had defied his efforts to banish House away in straw-padded boxes. Wilson, ever prepared, pulls a flashlight from his pocket, but House has already stepped inside with the breathless awe of a devotee who has gained access to his deity's innermost sanctum. His eyes widen, his nostrils flare, and pulling himself upright, he pivots slowly around his own axis, taking in everything he can see. And Wilson knows with crystal clarity why he chose to accompany House instead of giving him the key and leaving him to fend for himself - this is too good to miss.

House walks over to the massive wardrobe that used to stand in his bedroom and reverently lifts a hand to stroke the wood along the grain. Then he tugs the door open. Inside are House's biking gear, a few pairs of trainers, and some other random items.

"Wow, hot!" House says, fingering the leather jacket. "What happened to the bike?"

"Sold," Wilson says briefly. The brain procedure, performed in a private clinic near London, had eaten up all of House's assets and then some. They'd had to pay a hefty sum to persuade the owner to rent out an OT and nursing staff, and to keep mum about it afterwards.

A moment later House tosses a pair of trainers next to Wilson's feet. "Hang onto those, they're going back with us," he tells Wilson.

Not waiting to see whether Wilson is obeying his instructions he turns to a long, low object and pulls the dust sheet off it, revealing his leather couch. After staring at it for a few seconds he dives onto it face down. His torso vibrates as he inhales deeply, before exhaling with a sigh of deep satisfaction. After repeating the procedure twice he rolls over to squint up at Wilson.

"No 'personal belongings', huh? Wilson, you're a moron."

"Well, there are no pictures ... " House is right - he _is_ a moron. If House didn't consider pictures, photo albums, diaries, etc. of importance before his brain surgery, why should he do so now?

An hour later House is sitting among the crates surrounded by padding, books, journals, cooking utensils (Wilson has no idea why he packed those, but House used to be enormously proud and possessive of his state-of-the-art knives and saucepans), and balls (Wilson knows why he packed those), his expression a blend of bliss and that distilled concentration that he gets when he's on a case. Every now and then he holds up an item for Wilson's benefit or tosses it onto the growing pile of 'Things to be re-possessed at once', but mostly he's silent, totally absorbed in his exploration.

"A first edition of Gray's _Anatomy_ ," he announces, holding the leather-bound manuscript up before dropping it back into the crate. There's a longer silence while he sorts through journals; Wilson kills the time by thumbing through the pile that's already at his feet, thankful that he got rid of all of House's porn - they'd never get out of here if he hadn't, and rules in Mayfield are strict and _very_ pc on such matters.

House is frowning at a book in his hands; when Wilson approaches to see what it is, he looks up quickly and drops it back into the crate he's working on. At Wilson's querying glance he mutters, "It's nothing, just a Harry Potter book." He sounds ashamed, whether of his former juvenile reading habits or whether of his present interest in his children's books is difficult to say.

"You had an eclectic taste in reading," Wilson remarks casually. "We watched all the Harry Potter movies together, and you possess the entire Jack Cannon series. The Twilight series too, I should imagine."

"What, chick lit?" House says, disgusted.

"Well, maybe not. You definitely watched the movies, though."

House is rooting around in the crate again, resurfacing with three Jack Cannon books, his reading glasses slightly askew. "Ha, cool!" he says. "Dunno why they never made movies of those." Brandishing a book with a canary yellow dust jacket he says, "This one is the best in the series." He looks at a book with an ice-blue dust jacket in distaste. "Damn, I actually spent money on that last book! Had I known how craptastic it was, I'd never have bought it."

"You didn't buy it - she gave you a copy. Look inside: it's dedicated to you."

House opens the front cover. "It isn't signed."

"I said 'dedicated', not 'signed'. You told her not to mess up the pristine pages by splattering ink all over them," Wilson quotes loosely.

" _To Dr House, without whom this book would never have been completed_ ," House reads aloud when he finds the page with the dedication. He looks at Wilson questioningly.

"She was your patient and you saved her life," Wilson says, smiling.

"So she dedicated the crappiest book in the series to me?"

"It was the one she was working on when she fell sick."

House leafs through the book moodily. "It sucks! We don't find out the identity of Jack's father, and there's this totally ridiculous cliff-hanger ending. The stuff she wrote after the Jack Cannon series is complete mind-fuck: New Age nonsense about the mind finding healing." He grimaces. "I should've let the woman die!"

Wilson shakes his head, amused. "You're incapable of letting anyone die, even if saving their lives costs you," he says, thinking back on all the times House risked law suits, losing his license, and even the woman he loved, Stacy, in his drive to save his patients at all costs.

House glances at him sharply. Then he abandons the crate, wandering off to a bulky shrouded object at the back of the unit. There are a few boxes stacked on top of it, so he can only fold the dust sheet back, but when he does so the effect is even better than what Wilson envisioned when picturing this scene.

"Oh - My – Go-o-o-d!" House breathes in tones of hushed awe, an expression of unguarded wonder and delight on his worn, jaded features. Then he reverently trails his fingertips along the lid of the baby grand, his eyes closed, his mouth open slightly; Wilson feels voyeuristic watching him, but it's probably the only glimpse of House without his defences in place that he'll ever get. A sharp bolt of anger shoots through him at the thought of the women who were lucky enough to have House open up to them, whose betrayal made House shut down even further.

"Don't stand around - help me with this!" House orders, pulling him out of his reverie. He's pulling the boxes off the piano, piling them haphazardly wherever there's an empty space, with little regard for their contents. Wilson winces at a particularly loud crash and tinkle, remembering the hours he spent wrapping up wine glasses and whisky tumblers in tissue paper, and hurries to help House remove the last few cartons. Finally House tugs off the huge dust sheet, revealing his black baby grand in all its glory, and opens the lid. He plays a few experimental chords and arpeggios before giving Wilson a small nod of approval. That's all the acknowledgement he'll ever get for saving the instrument and renting heated storage space for it.

The stool is nowhere to be seen, so House pulls up a crate and sits down, lifting his hands with a flourish before bringing them down in a ringing chord. Next he plays scales, a cheek muscle twitching every now and then at some imagined dissonance.

"Needs to be tuned," he mutters.

Wilson shrugs. Trust House to find a hair in the soup. He glances at his watch - and freezes.

"House?" he says tentatively.

House, busy playing a chromatic scale from the lowest to the highest note, ignores him, although it's difficult to say whether that's deliberate - House won't respond to his real name, but Wilson refuses to participate in this charade of calling him Pete or Barnes, evading the issue whenever possible but calling him 'House' when it can't be avoided - or whether House is so immersed in the piano as to be deaf to all other auditory impulses.

"Here," House says, cocking his head sideways while he repeatedly presses the highest key - Wilson has no idea which note it is. There's a jangle that even Wilson has to acknowledge as non-imaginary. House rises and opens up the case, holding a hand out to Wilson without looking at him.

"Flashlight!" he demands.

Wilson goes back to the crates to retrieve it, saying, "It's almost seven. We have to leave or we'll be late."

House doesn't respond. He leans back to press the offending key again, and then he peers into the piano's innards, his tongue sticking out of the corner of his mouth. Wilson shines the flashlight into the corpus, aware that the sooner House gets to the bottom of the Mystery of the Jangling Note, the fewer speed limits he'll have to break on the drive back to Mayfield.

"Clever," House murmurs. He plucks the flashlight from Wilson's hand and shines it on a spot just below the shortest three strings. There's a small rectangular protrusion that at first glance looks as though it is part of the corpus, identical in wood and varnish.

"What is it?" Wilson asks reluctantly.

House grins. "I'd have to hazard a guess: my secretest stash of vicodin."

That's what Wilson fears too; the small box isn't large enough to hold more than a bottle of pills or a vial of morphine.

"It's really diabolical," House continues, with admiration at his own deviousness in his tone. "I must have slipped it in sideways and then glued it to the corpus. Now there's no way of getting at the pills without damaging the baby in some way. A Last Resort Stash, the addict's equivalent to the nuclear bomb. I wonder what it would have taken to make me break into that."

The drug's presence only adds to Wilson's sense of disquiet. "Let's go. We'll come back some other day ...,"

House is perched on the crate-stool once more, pounding out the first bars of a well-known, most un-House-ian hymn. Could House have turned to religion for solace in England? But then he breaks into song:

_Would you be free from your memories grim?_   
_There's power in the drug, power in the drug!_   
_Would you o'er sadness a victory win?_   
_There is wonder-working power in the drug!_

_There is power, power, conscience-numbing power_   
_In the poppy plant's juice._   
_There is power, power, eu-huh-phoric power_   
_In the juice of the poppy plant._

Wilson pulls out his cell phone and goes outside to escape the deafening din in the small unit.

"Hello? Darryl, it's James. I think we're going to be late. House has discovered his baby grand, and I can't get him to leave," he says all in a rush.

"And why is that your problem?" Darryl queries.

"Even if I manage to drag him away now, we won't make it by eight!" Wilson continues, doing his best not to sound whiny, but reasonable. "So is it okay if we come back a bit later?"

"James, _you_ have a day pass till eight. You are responsible for getting yourself back in time."

"But ... I can't leave House here."

"Why not?"

"How'll he get back? We came in my car."

He can hear Nolan sighing at the other end. "I take it that you informed him that it's time to leave."

"Yes, of course."

"Then he's aware of the consequences. It's his decision, just as waiting for him at the risk of having your privileges rescinded is yours."

"You want me to abandon him here?" Wilson asks disbelievingly.

Nolan chuckles drily. "It's a storage facility off Princeton, not Death Valley, and Greg's a big boy. It won't kill him."

"There's more," Wilson admits. "There's a vicodin stash glued to the inside of the piano. It's almost impossible to get at, but ...,"

"James, there are bars and liquor stores all the way from Philly to Princeton, yet I gave _you_ a day pass."

"But ... you released him into _my_ care today!"

"Did I say that?"

Wilson massages his neck, trying to remember what Darryl had said when they left Mayfield. "Not precisely," he mutters.

"Okay, then I'll see you in an hour," Darryl says.

Closing his phone, Wilson returns to the unit where House, a remote expression on his face, is playing a Brahms lullaby.

"House, we've got to go!" Wilson says, striving for firmness rather than desperation.

House misses the next chord and opens his eyes to scowl at his hands. He repeats the last few bars, gives a small nod of satisfaction and continues the piece.

"House!"

"Busy here."

Wilson tugs his fingers through his hair, pacing up and down the confines of the unit and willing himself to wait this piece out. Expecting House to interrupt a running process in order to follow an arbitrary rule about time limits is foolish and short-sighted. At the end of the lullaby, however, ...

... House promptly launches into the next hymn, singing along with a cruel, sideways glance at Wilson:

_What a friend we have in Wilson,_   
_All our fucked-up-ness to bear!_   
_What an ass he is to tarry_   
_When he knows he shouldn't care._

_Oh, what fun we often forfeit!_   
_Oh, the boredom we endure!_   
_But messing with his head provides us_   
_With an instantaneous cure._

That's it! Wilson extracts the key from his pocket and slaps it on the piano. "Lock up when you leave," he advises, and then he stalks out.

What with finding an employee who'll let him out of the compound and the delay he has already incurred, he's an hour late in returning to the ward. The only upside to having his privileges rescinded for three days (and his release date postponed once again) is that it gives him seventy-two hours to cool down before there's a danger that he'll run into House and wring his scrawny neck.


	21. The Return Journey

"The SSRIs you're on aren't working. I'm switching you to a different product," Nolan decrees.

"Which won't work either, because: I'm. Not. Depressed!"

Nolan gives him his I-know-better smirk. "Before you discovered your identity, you worked or you travelled around. You haven't worked at all since then ...,"

"It wasn't exactly exciting work," Pete shrugs

"... nor have you travelled anymore."

"There was no reason to - I know who I am now. And there's no reason to earn money if I don't need it to travel, is there?"

"But you do need some money to move to Seattle, and you need to get your paperwork done. You haven't done that either. Nor have you shown the slightest sign of doing so since you got to Mayfield. The work Dr Foreman is offering you isn't boring, so your reasoning doesn't hold."

Nolan can be damn irritating.

"Why," he asks, "aren't you getting your paperwork done so you can depart to Seattle?"

There's no answer to that. Not that it stops Nolan from speculating: "You lack motivation because you're depressed."

Pete snorts. Nolan continues, undeterred, "The reason I'm _sure_ you're depressed, however, is because you haven't made a serious attempt to jerk me around."

"You're assuming I'm depressed because I'm being nice?" He manages to pack any amount of incredulous indignation into his voice, but Nolan merely smiles.

"There's a difference between 'nice' and 'non-manipulative'," he quibbles. "Besides, I'm not sure I don't like you better when you are manipulative. But let's return to the question at hand: why aren't you applying to have your identity confirmed? You've been in Mayfield for twenty days now, you've talked me into giving you a fair number of your files, you've had a whale of a time at James's expense, you've even had two - successful - meetings with your lawyer to prepare for the hearing, but you've done zilch for your future."

Pete gestures to the side of the freeway they're travelling down. "Can I get out?" he asks.

Nolan responds by accelerating his Mercedes and overtaking a Cadillac.

Pete hums, _Oh Lord, won't you buy me a Mercedes-Benz?_

"I took the liberty of taking you down to Princeton two hours before the appointed time of the hearing because I want you to go to the Township and hand in your application. Max has taken care of all the paperwork. With a bit of luck you'll be Gregory House again within four weeks."

He's silent, trying to think of a good reason to refuse Nolan's request/order/injunction/demand. "You can't make me do that," is all he can come up with.

Nolan doesn't answer at once. He overtakes two more cars before he says, "You don't want to be Gregory House."

"This isn't about whether I _want_ to be Gregory House. I _am_ Gregory House, whether I want it or not," he says, because that's a fact.

"Yes, the rational part of you accepts that, but the rest of you doesn't. You're procrastinating because reclaiming his identity makes it an indelible fact, not just a theoretical possibility. What is it about Greg House that disturbs you so much?"

He shrugs nonchalantly, a gesture that is wasted on Nolan, who has his eyes on the freeway. "Nothing," he says. "It's just that I've gotten fond of Pete Barnes over the years. There's nothing - no memory - attached to House."

" _Now_ you're manipulating me," Nolan says appreciatively. "You're saying what you think I want to hear. You don't seriously believe I'll buy that you have got attached to an identity of which you knew from the start that it wasn't yours? I repeat: what's wrong with House?"

He doesn't reply. Asking a question ten times isn't going to increase Nolan's chances of getting it answered.

"Pete, I can't help you if you won't talk to me," Nolan says relentlessly.

His head is saying that he doesn't need help, that he's fine as he is, but the words are already bubbling out of his mouth. "I drove a car into my ex-girlfriend's house. How the hell am I supposed to be okay with that?"

"But you told me that when you started exploring your past, you were aware that you could have been guilty of some crime. In fact, you were reckoning with something of the sort," Nolan says.

"Not with trying to kill my girlfriend."

"Correct. You were expecting organised crime and murder. This," he says with emphasis, "seems highly preferable: no one got killed and you were not a hardened criminal."

"I committed an act of violence in a fit of uncontrollable rage. Whether someone got killed or not is not the point. Someone _could_ have got killed; four people nearly got killed, and one person got severely injured."

"I wouldn't call a sprained wrist a severe injury," Nolan observes.

Nolan thinks he's referring to Wilson. He doesn't correct Nolan; he isn't going to get into a debate on whether Rachel's injuries are his fault or not.

"No one got killed," Nolan repeats for what seems the umpteenth time, "and yet you are as bothered as if you had been a serial killer in the pay of the mafia. Ah, I get it," he says with that annoying expression of epiphany on his face. "If you had been a professional killer or had committed crimes as part of a 'job' for a crime syndicate, then you'd regret it on some abstract moral level, but you wouldn't fear a re-occurrence of your deeds. They'd have been committed in cold blood, so it would be _your_ decision to don that part of Greg House's identity or to leave it behind you. But a crime committed in the heat of the moment, one that you had no rational control over - that scares you, because who can guarantee that you won't repeat that?"

Nolan is so pleased with himself that he doesn't seem to expect an answer. Pete stares out of the window. They whizz past the sign announcing their exit to Princeton and Nolan pulls into the right lane, braking reluctantly.

"I can go back to England," Pete says.

"Now that," says Nolan, "is the first intelligent idea you've voiced so far. But don't rejoice too soon - you are getting your paperwork done. Today. If you return to England, it'll be as Greg House."

"You can't ...," Pete commences, raising his voice.

"I can," Nolan says, raising his voice to as much effect as Pete. "Listen to me: whether you turn back into Greg House or not will not affect your propensity to lose your calm and do things that hurt the people around you and, more importantly, yourself. I have no idea whether you were trying to kill Lisa Cuddy (and her date) or yourself, but either way you were trying to hurt her, even though it endangered your own well-being."

"Let me out of this car!"

"As soon as I've finished talking. Yes, remaining Peter Barnes and ignoring what happened here four years (and more) ago is a lot easier than facing what you did here and determining to do whatever it takes to avoid making the same mistakes again. Because that's work, work on yourself; it's long-term, not a quick fix; and it's nothing that can be cured with medication or an operation, not even one that removes your memories, because the deeds remain even if your memory of them fades or is erased. But keeping Peter Barnes's papers doesn't turn you into him. You. Are. Greg. House."

" _You_ call me 'Pete'," he objects weakly.

"I'll call you Napoleon if it keeps you happy - and if I consider it indicated. I do not consider it indicated to support you in your attempt to hide from your conscience. It's going to keep coming back to bite your butt. If you truly had none, I'd let matters rest, but the Greg House I knew had a very sensitive one, and from what I can make out, it didn't get compromised in the least."

He looks over at Pete. "I call you 'Pete' because I respect your decision to cut yourself loose from your past. You don't have Greg House's memories, either positive or negative, or any remembrance of being called by that name, so calling you 'Greg' doesn't make sense on any level. But as your therapist, respecting your decision to become a new person also entails directing you down the route that will enable you to drop everything that you objected to in your old life: there's no sense in turning into Peter Barnes if you allow those parts of Greg House to remain that led you into misery in the first place. You believed that your memories made you miserable, but it wasn't the _memories_ that made you miserable, it was their effect on your self-esteem. That effect is back, now that you know all about yourself, and believe me, you won't like yourself unless and until you do everything in your power to become the kind of person you want to be."

"I'll never be that kind of person."

Nolan purses his lips. "There's another reason I call you 'Pete'. It acknowledges the change in you from the 'Greg' I used to know, a _positive_ change. You're a lot easier to work with than you used to be: opener, lighter, more optimistic. Some of it is probably due to being practically pain-free, but I attribute most of it to a change in attitude. You're less fatalistic, more amenable to the notion of an open outcome that you can influence with your actions. You don't regard life as a steam roller that's out to flatten you any moment.

"I'm not asking you to change who you are; I'm asking you to change a few behavioural patterns that are more deeply ingrained than your episodic memory was. Luckily, you've lost the memories that caused those patterns; there's really no reason why you shouldn't be able to learn new ones with a minimal effort." At Pete's sceptical glance he adds, "Minimal compared to what it would have been five years ago and compared to what other people have to invest. There are a lot of downsides to what you did to your brain, but let's not lose sight of the upsides."

"You're one bloody optimist, aren't you?" Pete mutters, but on some level he's pleased at the qualified compliments he's getting.

"Comes with the job," Nolan says.

* * *

"Amnesia?" the blonde young clerk at the Township says when he submits the application his lawyer prepared. "Like in _Fifty First Dates_? Wow, cool!"

"For whom?" he asks. "For you, because you have a cool story to tell _your_ next date?"

"Sorry," she says, blushing.

He continues remorselessly, "Hate to disappoint you, but tomorrow morning I'll still remember the dumb clerk who thinks that losing one's memory is _so_ romantic."

She completes the paperwork in silence. "It'll take about three weeks, but I'll issue you temporary papers. Will that be okay, Mr House?"

"Yep, that's fine," he answers, and before he knows it he's holding a scrap of paper stating that he's Gregory House, born in 1961 in Lexington. Five minutes ago he was Peter Barnes, of unknown birthplace and age. It's hard to believe that it's so easy to turn into someone else.

It's also hard to believe that Detective Tritter is capable of causing such complications - the hearing, instead of taking the ten minutes that the situation warrants, drags along for three whole hours, all thanks to Tritter's obdurate attempts to prove that he's a hardened drug-peddling criminal, intent on evading the legal system by pretending to a false identity. (Okay, it doesn't help that the judge is a moron and - according to his lawyer - pointing this out to the judge doesn't help either.)

It's somewhere in the second hour of the tedious mess that he begins to appreciate Nolan's prescience in insisting that he file his papers to prove that he's Gregory House - that takes the wind out of Tritter's sails regarding identity fraud - and by the third hour he is ready admit that Lisa may not be all that paranoid to regard Tritter as a fiend in human guise.

The only diversion during the long ordeal is Lisa's PI. He sneaks into the court room while Nolan is testifying - a euphemism for a lengthy drone that includes citing whole paragraphs from a statement that _'the Maudsley Hospital, London, has been kind enough as to place at the court's disposal'_ \- and edges into the bench behind Pete.

"Hey," he says.

Pete's guts tighten while he looks ahead stonily as though mesmerised by Nolan's interpretation of Dr Weller's medical findings - no matter what he pretended to Lisa, he doesn't believe that his arrest the night of his confrontation with PI was a coincidence. The fellow probably has excellent connections to the local law-and-order, and heaven knows what lies he's prepared to dish out in a misplaced notion of chivalry towards Lisa.

"Hey!" the PI repeats. "Look, your place ... it's been cleaned; it's as good as new. And I've stocked the fridge. Here!" A hand shoots out next to Pete's right cheek. "Lisa's had your prosthetic fixed; it's there too."

Pete allows his eyes to flicker to the side. The hand is proffering a key - _his_ key; the key to his apartment in Trenton. He'd left it with Lisa the day she took him to Mayfield; she'd offered to get the place tidied up for him. His own fingers shoot up and snatch the key out of the PI's hand.

"Whoa!" Lisa's ex (or maybe not so ex?) exclaims. The judge scowls at them, and Pete's lawyer looks at him worriedly.

After a few minutes Pete deems it safe to look around to check on the fellow. He's leaning back with crossed ankles, listening avidly to what Nolan is saying. When he notices Pete mustering him, he leans forward again. "This amnesia thing - then it's true?"

Pete gives a short nod. The detective nods back knowingly. "You always were a mad dog," he says with a mixture of admiration and amused contempt. "Heard you're moving to Seattle," he adds after a short - too short - moment of silence.

The judge's glare is downright baleful. The PI gives her a friendly wave. Pete gets up. He needs to talk to this guy, find out whether he's here to threaten him; if so, then he needs to defuse him. He isn't going to risk any more unpleasantness because of a non-relationship with a woman who has her personal Sir Lancelot to protect her honour.

"Need the bathroom," he tells the judge, who is just short of an apoplexy.

The detective falls into step behind him. Outside the courtroom he heads to a stairwell that he discovered earlier in the day. Like every other place it sports a big 'no smoking' sign, but the pervading stench of cold cigarette smoke indicates that it's a favourite hang-out for adherents of the blue fumes. Pulling out his cigarettes, he lights one and inhales with a sigh of relief: the proceedings in the courtroom are draining his shallow reserves of patience.

He's surprised at how easy he finds it to _not_ sock the pesky weasel in the face. During the long nights in Mayfield he'd nurtured fantasies of acts of violence that he'd carry out if he ever ran into him again; he'd even considered seeking the man out - a casual conversation with Wilson revealed that his name was Lucas Douglas, and with that information he'd have been easy to locate. But faced with him now, the cause of past discomfort and his momentary legal problems, he's astonishingly indifferent to the notion of revenge. No, he amends, he's not indifferent to the notion of revenge, but he's not inclined to take it out physically on the man. He'll figure out something suitably demeaning sooner or later ...

"So, how'd you pickle your brain?" Lucas asks when Pete makes no attempt to start a conversation.

"Fried it, actually," Pete corrects absently. "EST is an electric procedure. You apply brief pulses of about 800 milliamps for a few seconds ... Are you even interested?"

"Sure, if you want to talk about it," Lucas says, but he's clearly humouring him.

Pete tips his head. "Why are you here? Did Lisa send you?" Lucas's demeanour this time round is more cocker spaniel than Rottweiler; the cunning and the covert aggression that marked their last encounter are so markedly absent that Pete almost believes that he imagined them. Almost, but not quite - there was, after all, a lot of shit spread through his apartment, not to mention the damage to his flex-foot.

"Well, yeah. Although 'ordered' is probably the word you're looking for." Lucas studies Pete's bemused expression. "You don't seriously believe I cleaned up your place for you because I _enjoy_ scraping cat shit off the walls."

Pete guffaws. "You went to Lisa and told her you'd turned my apartment into an animal cage and ratted me out to the police, expecting her to pat you on the head and give you a dog treat?" From what he's seen of Lisa and read about her in Nolan's therapy notes, she's not the type to appreciate people playing knight in shining armour and snatching her from the dragon's den. She _enjoys_ dancing with dragons.

Now it's Lucas's turn to narrow his eyes at Pete. "You didn't snitch on me?" he asks suspiciously. "No, I suppose you didn't. You've always been the private type. Broody and secretive - women love that, don't they?" He chews on his thumb nail. "Then Lisa must've figured it out herself. I wonder how. It's not like I did a lot of that kind of stuff while I was dating her - pranking and all that. I was kinda settled, domestic, reliable - the official contrast programme to Gregory House MD."

"She knows more than you give her credit for," Pete says drily. "You don't exactly have a poker face."

"No, I guess not. I'm good at observing and putting two and two together, but I can't for the life of me lie convincingly. Oh, well." He shrugs fatalistically. "Do me a favour: tell Lisa I apologised, will you?"

"Tell her yourself," Pete advises.

"Aw, come, be a sport! She's a little pissed off about the apartment ... okay, she's _very_ pissed off, especially about the prosthetic - seems that getting it fixed was a bit of a hassle. She wasn't exactly listening to what I was saying when she phoned me ... Wait! You won't tell her that I apologised, because you can't tell her! She isn't talking to you, right? Dumped you in Mayfield, and then washed her hands of you. Funny - I sorta get that she'd give up on you after your car-through-the-wall stunt, but since when do a few vicodin matter to her? She was drooling all over you even when you were popping them like they were breath mints. Unless she's got another guy; then ..." The detective gets a faraway expression on his face.

Shrugging indifferently, Pete pushes himself off the wall he's leaning against. He really couldn't care less what this twerp thinks. If it pleases him to believe that Lisa is mad at him, then that's just peachy, because he has no intention of telling him that he hasn't tried to contact Lisa since he was admitted to Mayfield. Nolan's decree (phrased as a 'suggestion') to avoid contact with Lisa is a godsend that enables him to ignore her while telling himself that he's just following his therapist's instructions for his own good and hers.

On the other hand, he'd rather not have Lisa stalked by Douglas; maybe the PI is simply obsessively interested in Lisa's life, maybe he's looking for potential blackmail material, or maybe he's just 'looking out' for her the way he did with Pete, but whichever it is, it won't serve to calm Lisa in her present jumpy state. Lucas isn't good enough at his job to stay undetected, but possibly he isn't so bad that Lisa can figure out who is stalking her. Judging by her driving technique when being tailed by him, Pete, on her way to drop off Wilson at Mayfield, she'll end up getting spooked and injuring herself or others.

So he says, "I've got an offer from Seattle Metropolitan to work as a consultant. I'll be going there as soon as I get Nolan's okay - Thursday or Friday - to look for an apartment. Neither of us wants a long distance relationship - Lisa doesn't think it's good for the kid." He blows a last lungful of smoke into Lucas's face, stubs out his cigarette to the dulcet sounds of the PI's coughs and returns to the courtroom before Lucas can question the logic behind his words.

When he gets back to the courtroom Nolan is winding up his testimony. Wilson, who arrived just before the hearing began, is next. He describes House's state before the EST, the procedure itself, and the results of the cognitive tests that Foreman performed on him right after the procedure. ( _He has vague memories of that: a bed in a clinic, his head hurting like hell, a hazy face, cards flashing at him, someone droning at him._ ) Wilson is factual and dry; it's a good performance, and it explains how Wilson managed to keep him out of jail the last time he was in court. (Of course, this time he's telling the truth.) He also cites from Foreman's case notes - Pete is prepared to bet that Foreman was hoping to be able to publish them one day, they're _that_ precise and extensive. Lovely, high-resolution brain scans and enough tests to make the data statistically relevant. If Weller could see them, he'd be green with envy.

Tritter puts up a valiant fight, but it's obvious from Pete's medical and personal records that he hasn't been living the life of a master of crime. Rather the opposite - Pete cringes when Nolan hands around pictures of his housing in Bristol and reads out his employment record over the past three years.

"Detective Tritter," the judge finally says. "If Mr House's aim in donning the identity of Peter Barnes was to defraud anyone, gain illegal possession of drugs or cover up any sort of criminal activity, then we can safely consider it proven that he failed dismally. I dismiss those charges. As for illegal possession of 20 Percocet pills comprising a sum total of 100 mg of oxycodone, I am convinced that Mayfield Psychiatric Institution, as represented by Dr Nolan, is far better able to deal with the issue than our penal system. Case dismissed!"

His lawyer, the same one who represented him in the car crash fiasco, turns to him to shake his hand. "Congratulations, Mr House."

His mouth twitches. "If you're expecting me to point out that you did the work or to thank you, you're in for a long wait."

Delaney, a blond jovial man in his mid-forties, throws back his head and laughs. "Oh, no! I wasn't expecting anything of the sort. I'm grateful that you didn't do your damndest best to sabotage the hearing." The lawyer pauses, tipping his head sideways. "And I'm glad that you are better. I wish you ...,"

"What do you mean, 'better'?" Pete asks suspiciously.

Puzzlement crosses Delaney's features, only to be replaced by comprehension. He puts a hand on Pete's arm that Pete musters abstractedly. "When first I met you, you were impossible to work with. I was sure we'd come out of _that_ trial with you in prison for a crime you presumably didn't commit and my reputation in shreds." He grins almost boyishly. "I wouldn't say you're a _pleasure_ to work with as yet, but we're getting there, yes, we're getting there."

"I hope not," Pete grimaces. Delaney's eyebrows rise. "No offense, but this afternoon was not an experience I'm keen on repeating."

"That's the spirit!" Delaney says, slapping his back.

Nolan comes over. He and Delaney exchange a few words, the usual polite tripe. Wilson stays aloof; he's still passive-aggressively sore because of the incident in the storage unit. Pete is zoning out, bored, tired, and stressed at hours of enforced politeness, when Detective Tritter walks over to their group. Delaney instinctively puts out a protective-restraining hand which Pete evades with a quick sideways step, but Tritter keeps a diplomatic distance.

"Well done," he says in a soft tone that nonetheless penetrates the bustle around them.

Pete doesn't try to supress a smirk of victory. "Playing the fair loser?"

Tritter's smile doesn't touch his eyes. "I don't consider myself to have lost." He puts in an artful pause. "The outcome of this trial is a lot better than I expected: for reasons that elude me, your network of enablers swings into action every time there is the slightest chance that your crimes will catch up with you. But it is now officially established and recorded that you suffer from - correct me if I get the term wrong - severe retrograde amnesia, which means that you can't get your license back, ever, _Mr_ House. You will never practice medicine again - unless you intend to repeat your entire medical training. Future generations of patients are safe from your unethical practices, your disregard of patient wishes, your abuse of your position to carry out risky and unnecessary procedures. You will never be able to use the authority of your profession again to bully others or hoodwink the system."

"Wrong," Pete says with all the vindictiveness that Tritter masks so well. "I have an offer from Seattle Metropolitan to work as consultant for their diagnostic department."

"Congratulations," Tritter says, not trying for the least semblance of sincerity, "but it's not the same as being a tenured head of department. I think you'll find that consultants are granted a lot less leeway than employees, and are a lot easier to jettison. There's no Dr Cuddy to protect you there, and I doubt any other dean will jeopardise his career or his reputation to save your sorry ass."

"Detective Tritter," Nolan says warningly, but Tritter has turned away already. An uncomfortable silence ensues.

"So," Delaney finally says with forced heartiness, "you have an offer from Seattle. I wish you all the best, Dr House."

"Thanks," he murmurs awkwardly, noting that Delaney has switched to the medical title that is his no longer.

Wilson, who has been frowning after Tritter, chimes in. "You've got a concrete offer from Foreman?"

He nods.

"Well, that's ... great." Wilson pauses. "I guess," he adds. When Nolan raises an enquiring eyebrow, Wilson explains, "It could mean that Foreman has got interesting cases that he can't solve without House's help, in which case House can dictate his conditions and pretty much do as he pleases. But I've checked Foreman's record; the department is small, but it is reasonably effective. His mortality rates are higher than House's used to be, but not significantly so. It could mean that he's refusing tricky cases, but that isn't Foreman's style. He's the typical younger brother out to prove that he's as good as his older sibling."

"Which means?" Delaney asks.

"That it's more likely that he wants to use House's name as a magnet to pull cases on board, but that he doesn't really want House taking an active role in the cases. And House, not having any sort of official status other than a consultant, won't be able to do anything about it."

"Wouldn't that be rather ineffective, paying Dr House to _not_ do his job?" Delaney is somewhere between confused and fascinated.

"Umm, having House running around a hospital doing his 'thing' can be quite stressful," Wilson says with a quirk. "He has a habit of accruing horrendous bills for legal costs and for damaged equipment. Besides, his name alone will bring the hospital considerable donations, far in excess of his own fees as a consultant. So Foreman stands to win, no matter whether he lets House do his job or not." Turning to Pete he adds, "You should offer your services to Cameron."

"Cameron? Allison Cameron?" Pete asks, although he knows quite well whom Wilson means. "You mean the woman you're screwing?"

Wilson flushes. "I'm not sleeping with ...,"

"She hates me." Pete says bluntly. He'd run into her again when he'd gone to PPTH to get a copy of his medical records, and she'd been collected, cold and repelling.

"She _needs_ you. She has bitten off more than she can chew by expanding the department to its present size."

"Sorry, I don't do assembly-line diagnostics. I believe in good old-fashioned virtues such as close contact with each individual patient - no new-fangled stuff like multi-tasking, etc."

Wilson grins briefly. "Cameron isn't running a Department of Diagnostics, she's running an ER without the trauma cases. At the moment she's got two lanes: one, patients the janitor could have diagnosed; two, the straight route to the morgue. She needs you to save lives for her. If you go to Seattle you'll be a feather in Foreman's cap, but no more than that. In Princeton, you can make a difference. And that's going to matter more to Allison than all the things she disapproves of."

"You guys are very odd," Delaney remarks out of nowhere.

Nolan rolls his eyes. "You're telling me! Gentlemen, edifying though this may be, I need to get back to Mayfield. The limousine awaiteth you."

Pete's a bit surprised when Wilson walks over to Nolan's car with them - he didn't drive down with them, after all.

"I spent the weekend at Cuddy's place, and she drove me down to Princeton this morning," Wilson explains, opening the front passenger door and getting in. That leaves the back seats for Pete. Wilson offers no information on Lisa or Rachel, and Pete doesn't ask. He sprawls inelegantly over the back bench, his trainers on the upholstery.

"C'n we drop by my apartment?" he asks Nolan. "I want to pick something up."

"Sure," Nolan says easily.

"And do I get another file for being such a good boy today?" he wheedles.

Nolan takes a thick file out of his briefcase and hands it to him with a smile. "Here. You've more than earned this one. Feet off my car upholstery, please."

It's the one about the infarction. Well, there's more than one file on that - he's read the one that has the bare bones of the medical information, with lots of red comments by Nolan ('Too distanced, purely factual information - refuses to deal with emotional aspects!'). This one, however, has all the background information, and tons on his then-girlfriend. This is - _good_!

"How many more files are there?" he asks Nolan.

"Three," Nolan says, fiddling with the Satnav.

"Do I get them on Thursday?"

"What's on Thursday?" Wilson asks, too curious to play stick-in-the-mud any longer.

"Release date," he answers tersely.

"Wh-what?" Wilson stutters. "How come you're getting released?"

This is really _too_ good. "Because I've been a good boy. Followed the rules, did my homework, answered the teacher's questions, came out top of the class."

Nolan sighs, giving him a warning glance in the rear mirror. He sticks his tongue out in return. He _has_ been good, all things considered.

Wilson is sputtering now. "Why does _he_ get released, while _my_ release date keeps getting pushed further and further back?"

"Because there's no medical reason to keep him any longer," Nolan says. The vein at the side of his neck is throbbing.

"So? My release date gets postponed and I get grounded because I'm _one_ hour late, but he gets released although he stays out all night?" Wilson whines.

"Pete, would you like to comment that?" Nolan says with another glance in the mirror. It's more of an order than a question. "And fasten your seatbelt, please."

"I had an overnight pass," Pete mutters.

In the ensuing silence Nolan starts the car and pulls out of the parking lot. Wilson is hunched over, massaging the bridge of his nose.

"He had an overnight pass, but neither of you saw fit to tell me," Wilson finally says in an icy tone, glaring at Nolan.

"James, I want you to fulfil your obligations to yourself - regardless of anyone else's needs," Nolan says calmly. "Unless and until you can do that, you need treatment. This was not an incident I would have provoked, but in a way I'm glad it happened."

"See, I did you a favour," Pete smirks.

"Naturally," Nolan adds, with a measured look in the mirror, "that doesn't exonerate Pete, but _that_ makes my point all the clearer. Pete is quite capable of looking after himself. There is no need to play the sacrificial lamb for him, especially since he didn't ask you to do so. ... Pete, is this it?"

They halt in the no-parking zone in front of his apartment. Pete gets out, followed by Nolan.

"Do you mind if I come along?" Nolan asks.

Pete shrugs. He knows he's in for a dressing-down because of Wilson; it may as well be sooner rather than later. But Nolan doesn't say anything as they go upstairs and Pete unlocks his door. He puts his head around the door carefully - it'll take more than a display of remorse on Lucas's part to make him trust the man. At first glance and smell, however, there's nothing of note. The place is tidy, almost pristine. The rug is gone, replaced by a garish patchwork homage to some indigenous culture. The walls have been repainted in a brighter shade of yellow than Pete would've picked, but he doubts he'll spend more than a few weeks here and he certainly won't spend that time staring at the walls, so he's not about to complain.

Leaning prominently against the coffee table is his prosthetic with its flex foot blade, showing no overt signs of damage any more. He goes over to it and picks it up, giving its length a loving stroke and twirling it experimentally a few times. It feels balanced; there's no sign of wear and tear along shaft or blade.

"That's my baby!" he says approvingly. He looks over at Nolan. "Okay, we can go. The rest will keep till Thursday."

"That's the prosthetic that was ruined?" Nolan asks. He is informed about the state the apartment was in after Pete's arrest, and the subject of the prosthetic has come up once or twice. "I hear they're very expensive. Is it mended or has it been replaced?"

"The socket's the same, but the blade and the shaft have been replaced," Pete says, holding the prosthetic out for Nolan to examine. "The blade is made of a carbon composite. It's tough, but if you maltreat it, you'll never know when it'll snap. Fatigue, it's called."

Nolan handles the prosthetic like a box of eggs, testing the elasticity of the blade with every sign of respect. "And you can run with this like with a real leg?" he asks.

"Can't remember running with two real legs, but I'd say, essentially - yes. The two legs feel different, but one learns to balance it out. I'd never have managed with my normal prosthetic - there's this short moment in a stride when both legs are off the ground, and it took me all of two weeks to brave it with the blade. I still have problems with inclines."

Nolan hands the prosthetic back. "That blade is a good metaphor for James. You can keep testing him and pushing him and he'll hold up, coming back for more. But you won't see the damage, and he may well snap just when you need him. Think about it."

Walking towards the door of the apartment he adds conversationally, "When I applied to the Maudsley for your medical records, Dr Weller was very interested in your potential. The Maudsley itself doesn't have any use for a diagnostician, but Weller has contacts to Guy's Hospital and to Oxford University. Both are interested in having you as a member of their faculty."

He tips his head sideways, analysing Nolan's words. "Why would I want to return to England?"

"Why not? It's where you opted to be abandoned when you erased your memory. You have a social network there that doesn't know a thing about the infamous Greg House. You'd be able to reboot your diagnostic career without having to cope with the agendas of your former employees. You'd put a safe distance between yourself and James. Take your pick."

"You think Wilson is a danger to me?" he says somewhat incredulously.

"I am of the opinion that in high concentration, neither of you is beneficial to the other. In his present state James isn't up to the kind of stress that your presence here is causing him."

The first part of the drive back to Mayfield passes in silence. Wilson, riding shotgun, stares out of the window. Pete studies his file; it reads like a bad telenovella. Hang on - his ex-girlfriend returned five years later to have him treat her husband? That couldn't have gone well.

The next few pages show that, indeed, it did _not_ go well. The interesting thing is, it _nearly_ did. He blamed her for saving his life, terrorised her husband, hacked her therapy file, and invaded her privacy, and the net result was that she ended up in bed with him. That's fascinating in a creepy sort of way. What is it that makes women he abused forgive him and return to him? Is he attractive to a certain kind of woman, the type that can't seem to recognise when their boundaries are violated? He ponders the Sharon fiasco; she'd considered them to be in a relationship, and yet she'd accepted his 'infidelities' as a given. In retrospect he considers it well possible that he'd deliberately shut his eyes to what he'd sensed she was assuming about them, which made him culpable of an emotional kind of abuse. Does he target women who are prone to abuse?

"Stacy - what's she like?" he asks Wilson, forgetting that Wilson is giving him the cold shoulder.

"Stacy? Successful constitutional lawyer, about fifty, married - as you've probably gathered," Wilson, equally forgetful, answers.

"Not _'who_ is she?', but _'how_ is she?' Just turn the letters round."

Wilson thinks. "She's smart, funny, gutsy. Strong." He scratches his eyebrow. "Very strong."

That doesn't sound like the woman he's been picturing. "She couldn't cope with me - she left," he objects.

"That's what I mean. Sometimes it takes strength to go. She didn't put up with your crap, ever. You admired that."

"Maybe I should go see her," he says thoughtfully.

Wilson twists round. "Why would you do that?"

"Since my mother is dead, she's the person who has known me the longest. It makes sense to talk to her if I want to know what I used to be like," he explains.

"You've known me almost as long. You can talk to me," Wilson points out, somewhat piqued.

"You gonna tell me what I was like in bed? No? I thought not. So, Stacy it is. What's her last name?" Wilson stares out of the front window stonily. "Ah, here it is - Warner."

"If you want to know what you're like in bed, why don't you talk to Cuddy?"

"Husband is a high school counsellor. Can't be too difficult to find her," he ruminates.

"... She's got enough of a guilt complex to _want_ to oblige you, ..."

He tunes Wilson out. "Letter, email or phone call, that's the question. Phone call has the advantage of the element of surprise, ..."

"We could also try to find Dominika - your ex-wife." Wilson's voice has an edge of desperation. "I've got her forwarding address somewhere."

"... but a letter is more personal - shows interest and attention."

"If this is about what you were like before the infarction, there's Crandall - a friend of yours from school."

"Of course, an email is more likely to get though - people glance over it, and hey presto, they've read it before they even realise who it's from!"

Wilson huffs audibly. "You're not listening, are you? Has no one told you that it's rude to ignore people who are talking to you?"

"Has no one told _you_ that it's rude to change the topic? I'm talking about Stacy."

"If you want to know what kind of a boyfriend you were, just - go and ask Cuddy. At least there's no marriage to wreck there, and she knows as much about you as Stacy does, if not more."

He waves his hand airily. "We only dated for, what, nine months, we didn't 'cohabit', and before that she was just my boss. She doesn't really know what I was like before the infarction."

"She's known you since med school," Wilson points out. That's news. "That's longer than anyone else who's still alive, as far as I know. You don't _want_ to talk to her," he surmises, doing one of his funny, jerking things with his hand. "You're avoiding talking about Cuddy _and_ to Cuddy. You don't want to talk to Cuddy," he thinks for a moment, "because you still haven't forgiven her."

"That's crap!" he says despite himself.

"No, it isn't," says Wilson in his best I-knew-it voice. "You've forgiven _me_ for keeping your identity from you - why not her?"

"Huh? Why should I be mad at her for that?" he says reasonably. "I had Foreman do invasive EST for exactly that purpose, so why should I be pissed at her for supporting my blatant wish to keep my identity from myself?"

Nolan's eyes are trimmed on the freeway, but the slight backward tip of his head indicates that he's tuned in to every word. He's probably having a field day in every respect.

"Okay." Wilson modifies his thesis. "You're mad at her for having your leg amputated. I don't care what Chase told you: She. Saved. Your. Life! Don't blame her for that - she's got a monopoly on guilt and she makes full use of it."

This defies logic, as Wilson should know. "I _know_ she saved my life - I've braved the Gorgon that guards PPTH and read my medical files, and I'm aware that if Chase had had his wicked way with my leg, I'd be a feeding ground for worms now," he says, a muscle twitching in his cheek, "though I doubt that saving my life was high on her list of priorities at the time. But still, results count, not intentions, whether good or bad. Then again, maybe I should be mad at her for what she did during the infarction. No idea why she advised Stacy to authorise the debridement."

"Because you were killing yourself and they wanted you to live, you moron!"

Pete gestures at the file. "Precisely. Patients are idiots, and apparently I was no exception. If they were going to go behind my back they should have gone all the way and amputated. Instead they went for a knuckle-headed compromise, typical administrative shilly-shallying that made no one happy. Idiots! But I forgive them. _Te absolvo_!" he declaims theatrically. "So you don't need to worry - I can let bygones be bygones, and when I see Stacy, ..."

"Don't!" Wilson says.

"Don't what?"

"Don't _do_ this. What were you going to do - drive up to their place, ring the bell and say, 'Hi Stacy, hi Mark, you remember me, but I don't remember you, so won't you tell me how Stacy and I were when we were together?"

He's genuinely puzzled by Wilson's near panic at the idea, so he says in his most reasonable voice, "Yeah, that sounds like a plan." Wilson throws up his hands. Mindful of Nolan's previous rebuke, he forces himself to add, "This ... isn't just about the sex. I want to know what she saw in me."

"Yes, I suppose that could work," Wilson says, his voice dripping with sarcasm. "I'm sure Stacy will enjoy telling you what exactly made her so susceptible to you, abandoning the good thing she had with Mark on the off-chance that you two would work again, while Mark listens, smiling benevolently."

That makes no sense whatsoever. "She - didn't return to me," he says, turning back to the pages in the file where Nolan noted down the details of his second-time-around relationship with Stacy. "She _did_ me, and then she left Princeton with Mark."

"Because you pulled out at the last moment," Wilson says with thin lips. "You got into her pants, had her on the verge of leaving Mark - who was in despair - and then you got cold feet."

"Oh." There's nothing about that in his therapy file, just the bald statement that Stacy left Princeton with Mark after his out-patient treatment was completed. He scratches his eyebrow with his thumb. "Well, it's over ten years ago now. They must have got over it if they're still married."

"They're still married, they've adopted two teen boys - or are fostering them, not sure about that - and the last thing they need is you popping up in their lives turning everything upside-down."

He gives Wilson his mock-hurt hand-over-his-heart routine to hide the very real dismay he feels at the assumption that his intention in visiting Stacy is to wreak havoc. "I have no intention of _doing_ her - again; I just want to talk!"

"House!" Wilson yells. "You really don't understand, do you?" Mustering him closely, he sighs. "No, you don't. ... It's all very well for _you_. You can't remember a thing, so for you it's an academic study: you're filling in the gaps in a patient history that happens to be your own. It isn't like that for _us_. For us, you're someone who has been gone for three years, which really isn't all that long - I've gone considerably longer without seeing a single member of my family. There are memories attached to you, and feelings to those memories. If you visit Stacy, you'll undoubtedly find out tons of interesting things about your past - and then you'll go. But chances are that you'll leave her marriage in shreds again, because although she won't mean more to you than any other brunette you meet, you will always be The Guy for her." He rubs a tired hand over his face. "God, why am I even bothering?" he mutters mostly to himself.

Pete observes him as he turns back to face the front, sinking, almost shrinking, into his seat, the lines in his face prominent, his mouth turned down with exhaustion.

"I'm sorry," Pete says quietly.

Wilson freezes. Then, still facing the windscreen, he gives an almost imperceptible little nod.


	22. The Last Stage

It's what Mom's sister Julia, rolling her eyes, calls 'one of those days': all rush-rush, now-don't-argue, get-in-the-car-honey. Mom is late already when she comes to pick Rachel up from school.

"Nana is taking care of you this afternoon," she says as she pulls out of the school parking lot rather sharply.

"Oh, no!" Nana is awfully fussy about food, and she says she can't play any of Rachel's 'fancy, modern' games, and she's all uptight about homework. "Why can't _you_ stay at home with me?"

"I'm picking Wilson up from Mayfield, sweetie," Mom says, glowering at the red light and tapping the steering wheel with her fingertips.

"Can't I come along?"

"I don't know how long it'll take. He's being released today - that means that he doesn't have to go back."

"Is he gonna stay with us?"

Mom smiles at her in the rear mirror. "Just for a few days."

That's good. Wilson cooks good stuff, and he likes playing with her. That reminds Rachel of her original problem.

"Can't I wait at Louisa's place?" Louisa doesn't care what Rachel eats, and she's a lot more trusting than Nana. She _believes_ Rachel when she says that she has no homework. It drives Mom crazy, but she's too polite to tell Louisa that she's fallen for the fibs of an eight year old.

"I really can't impose on Louisa anymore. Besides, I have no idea whether she's there or not - I think it's her book club afternoon. You'll be fine with Nana."

No, she won't, but Mom's tone indicates that it's no use arguing with her.

When they get to the apartment, Nana is already ensconced in the kitchen drinking the inevitable cup of coffee. "That's a really foul brew you keep, Lisa," she says by way of greeting. "Hello, Rachel dear."

"I don't drink much coffee at home," Mom says absently. "How did you get in?"

"Lisa," Nana says with a laugh, "you've always kept your spare key in the first place a burglar would look for it. One would think that certain events would make you more safety conscious, but no!" She says 'certain events' with the emphasis that she always uses when she's talking grown-up stuff that Rachel isn't supposed to understand. It drives Mom crazy in a not-so-good way; it usually ends up with Mom in a really foul mood or all thoughtful and no fun. And it doesn't take being a grown up to realise that most of the time Nana is being mean to Mom. Like now.

Mom shrugs off her coat. "He didn't break into my house; he _drove_ into it."

Nana looks all ready to counter with another snide comment, so Rachel intervenes. (She's seen how Julia does it, by drawing their attention to her presence. If they don't want her hearing their grown up talk, they have to change the topic.) "Who drove into our house?" she asks loudly.

It works: both of them turn to her, Mom looking slightly ashamed. "Oh, this drunk guy who drove his car into our house in Princeton. You've heard the story," she says.

Nana takes her cue from Mom. "So, Lisa, what matter of importance is it that allows me to look after my granddaughter today? A meeting - or a date?"

That's ridiculous, because Mom doesn't date - which is one of the things Nana nags her about. When they go to her place for Thanksgiving, Granddad's birthday anniversary or Hanukkah, Nana invariably picks on Mom, saying she should try to be more like her sister Julia and find a 'nice, steady man' or a 'father-figure' for Rachel. If Julia isn't there to intervene, it ends with Mom smiling that stuck-on smile of hers that means that she's about to combust and Rachel getting an extra-long goodnight story at bedtime, because Mom doesn't want to go back downstairs to where Nana is waiting to pick on her some more.

So Rachel chips in once again. "She's going to Mayfield to pick up Wilson."

Apparently that wasn't a good thing to say, because Mom breathes out heavily, while Nana perks up.

"Wilson? Wasn't that his friend's name? And isn't Mayfield the name of that - that institution for nut cases?"

"Yes, Mom, James Wilson is a friend of mine from Princeton, and yes, Mayfield is a psychiatric institution," Mom says with her take-a-deep-breath-and-count-to-ten mien.

Nana looks _really_ shocked, not pretend-shocked like when she's needling Mom. "Lisa Cuddy, have you gone _completely_ insane? You've done this before - taken in a _meshugener_ who wrapped you around his little finger - and see where it got you! See where it got your daughter! Don't you, ever, learn from your mistakes?"

Rachel can't remember any madmen, and although Mom can do all sorts of funny yoga bends, there's no way she could wrap herself around someone's finger.

"He wasn't a lunatic, and _you_ liked him, too!" Mom counters with more vigour than she normally displays towards Nana.

Nana backtracks skilfully. "That _shmendrik_ was a real charmer, and I don't blame you for falling for him, but do you have to do it again?" Rachel would love to know who they are talking about, although what this has got to do with Wilson coming over to stay is a mystery to her.

"Mother, I am _not_ doing it again!" Mom says, raising her voice. "Wilson is a friend, nothing more; he's staying for a few days until his place in New York is ready, and then he'll be gone; he's a sweet, harmless man, not a mass murderer."

Nana gives her one of her looks and says testily, "Yes, yes, and the other one was 'the love of your life'. Lisa, you can't keep dragging crazy men into your daughter's life."

Mom stems her hands in her hips. "So someone I've known for years - who _isn't_ crazy, by the way - is 'unsafe', but the guys Julia wants to set me up with, whom I don't know at all, can't possibly be crazy, abusive or paedophiles, right?"

Nana isn't impressed at all. " _You_ have shown that you are no judge whatsoever of men, regardless of whether you've known them for twenty days or twenty years, whereas your sister's friends are a nice steady bunch. You attract crazy people, Lisa. You _like_ them." She looks at Mom over the rim of her glasses. "Phone the loony bin and tell them that you're sorry, but you can't make it."

"Sorry, I'm not having this discussion," Mom says. "I'm going to get Wilson now. Are you going to look after Rachel while I'm gone?"

"I'm not enabling you in this," Nana says with equal determination.

"Then I'll take her with me. Rachel, go get a book to read and come."

Rachel looks from one to the other, but neither Mom nor Nana show any sign of backing down, so she wheels her chair to her room and claws _Harry Potter Movie Wizardry_ from the shelf - it's all about how the movies were made and it has tons of pictures from the ones she isn't allowed to watch yet. Suddenly she isn't all that enthusiastic about accompanying Mom to Mayfield; Mom isn't going to be in a good mood after having Nana get in her hair. It's a new record for them - normally Mom manages to stay calm and 'diplomatic' (that's what Mom calls ignoring Nana's jabs) much, much longer.

When she wheels herself back into the hallway, Mom is waiting with her coat. Seeing the book on Rachel's lap reminds her of something. "What about your homework, young lady?" she asks.

"No homework," Rachel tries.

Mom rolls her eyes, picks Rachel's school bag off the floor where she left it and opens the front door. "You don't have to wait for us, Mom," she calls back into the kitchen where Nana is still nursing her cup of coffee. Then she gives Rachel's wheelchair a nudge.

"Bye, Nana," Rachel calls. Then she wheels herself out. Mom follows her, slamming the apartment door shut behind them.

"You always tell me not to do that," Rachel can't help pointing out.

"Sorry," Mom says, but it's automatic. She isn't really listening. She works off her frustration by thumping Rachel's wheelchair into the boot of the station wagon and slamming the car doors too, but by the time she slides behind the steering wheel, she's calm again. She gives Rachel a quirky look. "Guess you're coming along after all."

When they arrive at Mayfield Mom nearly blows her top again. There are five long steps leading up to the front door - and no ramp, just a blue disabled sign with an arrow pointing towards the corner of the building and a notice saying, 'Wheelchair access 500 yards'. The path leading that way hasn't been cleared and is covered in about two inches of snow. Mom says a word that's strictly prohibited in school, and looks down at her questioningly. She holds out her arms so Mom can pick her out of the wheelchair and carry her up the steps. Mom places her on the top step and runs back down to get the wheelchair.

"You aren't going to be able to do that much longer," Rachel remarks as Mom places the wheelchair in front of her and helps her get back in it.

"I know, I know - I'll get lumbago, and then we can have wheelchair races down the road together."

Inside, Mayfield doesn't look anything like the hospitals Rachel has been in, nor does it smell right. It doesn't have that clean, medicine-y smell, it's a lot more cramped, and there aren't so many people rushing around. After registering at the desk (and complaining about the absence of a ramp, much to Rachel's embarrassment), Mom pushes her to the elevator, stabbing the button viciously.

"This hospital is strange," Rachel says as they drive up to the fourth floor.

"It's not a real hospital," Mom explains. "It's for people with mental disorders. If something is wrong with the brain, the patient needs special doctors, and Mayfield is one of the places just for that."

"Can't the doctors in normal hospitals do that? You told me they cut into brains in your hospital too."

"Okay, maybe I didn't explain it well. This is more like a rehab, like the one you went to after your accident. This is a brain rehab."

On the fourth floor Mom wheels her out of the elevator to a double door, where she rings a doorbell. A male nurse comes to open the door, locking it behind them again. That's really odd, because in school the teachers aren't allowed to lock any doors so one can escape in case of a fire. What'll happen if there's a fire here, now?

They're in a big room, bigger than Rachel's classroom, but nowhere near as cheery and bright. People are sitting around in small groups or by themselves. A man is pacing up and down agitatedly; a woman on a couch is making low moaning sounds, largely ignored by the group of elderly men playing cards next to her; another woman is standing by the window talking to the room at large, but no one seems to be listening to her either. It's creepy.

"Dr Wilson's in his room, packing," the nurse says, gesturing down towards a corridor at the end of the big room, and Rachel is relieved when they reach the doorway to the corridor.

The door to Wilson's room is slightly ajar. Mom raps on it before pushing it open. Wilson is standing in front of his bed, closing a suitcase that's lying there.

"Hey, Wilson," Mom says. Then her face falls - leaning against the window is a tall, lanky figure. "Pete," she says shortly.

"Ah, Cuddy," Wilson says. "Hi, Rachel." He rubs the back of his neck.

"Hi, Wilson," Rachel says automatically. Mom gets upset when she doesn't greet people.

"Umm, House ... ," Wilson gestures towards Pete, "didn't realise you'd be coming."

Pete's eyes roam over Mom, then he musters Rachel without greeting her. That's good because then she won't have to greet him in turn, and Mom can't even accuse her of being rude. She doesn't like saying hello to near-strangers, and she isn't sure she likes Pete. He's okay, but not nearly as nice as Wilson, and the last time she'd seen him, he'd been a real grouchy-bear. She and Mom had driven somewhere in the middle of the night to pick him up, and he'd fought with Mom, and in the morning she'd been all sleepy and grumpy because she hadn't slept enough, and she'd still had to go to school! Pete had been bad-tempered at the breakfast table, and Mom had been angry and sad at the same time.

"Wouldn't have made a difference if I had," Pete says to Mom, "because I would have come anyway." He and Mom are staring each other down, the way Mom and Nana sometimes do. It looks like she and Pete aren't friends any more. "I came to say goodbye to Wilson. I'm leaving tomorrow."

"Oh," Mom says, looking surprised and not really happy. "Off to Seattle?"

"No, London. Consulting at Guy's and possibly teaching a few classes at King's College."

"That's ... great!" Mom says brightly, but Rachel can tell that she doesn't mean it. She turns on Wilson. "You didn't mention this."

"I, uh, ..." Wilson scratches his eyebrow with his thumb. "Does it make a difference?"

"No!" Mom snaps. "No, of course not." She fidgets around with Rachel's wheelchair.

"Mo-om!" Rachel says, annoyed.

"Sorry," Mom says. She twists her necklace instead.

"If I'd known you were coming," Wilson says to Rachel, "I'd have saved you some cake."

"Sorry," Mom says again, this time to Wilson. "My mother was supposed to look after her, but ... "

She trails off, biting her lip, and Rachel realises with horror that Mom is on the verge of crying. That can't be - Mom _never_ cries. Never, ever. Rachel feels hot and cold at the same time. What is she supposed to do? It's all Nana's fault for yelling at Mom and picking on her. Wilson and Pete are staring at Mom, too, with interest. They've probably never seen her cry either. They'll think Mom's a cry-baby, when she totally isn't!

"Nana yelled at Mom," Rachel says, glowering at the two men, daring them to make fun of Mom. She can't really say that Nana yelled because of Wilson - she knows instinctively that Mom wouldn't want Wilson to know that - so she says the other thing that comes to mind, the thing Nana was insinuating all the while she and Mom were arguing this afternoon. "She says it's Mom's fault that I can't walk." She isn't supposed to know that, but at least it isn't rude towards Wilson to say it, so she figures it'll be okay.

Until she sees Mom's face.

"That's ... that's ridiculous!" Wilson says to Mom. "Your mother is crazy."

Pete shifts his stance. "No, it's not. It's true," he says without any inflection.

"House!" Wilson yells.

Mom sucks in a sharp breath. She looks bad, like the time she had a tummy bug and upchucked for two days. Maybe she's sick. Rachel wishes she could have spent the afternoon with Nana.

Pete looks at the floor. "She shouldn't have dated me. She knew I was insane and an addict and emotionally screwed up."  
  
Mom dated _Pete_? No way!

Wilson stems his hands into his hips. "So that makes it Cuddy's fault that you drove your car into her house. Great, House, just great! Lay the blame at her door, absolve yourself from all responsibility, go on wreaking havoc in everyone's lives!"

Wasn't it some drunk who'd driven into their house?

"That's not what I said," Pete (or is it House? Rachel is confused) says, raising his voice too for a moment. "What _I_ did is entirely on me and would have been heinous even if no one had got hurt, but Lisa is to blame for exposing her kid to a madman. Blame isn't something that comes in a quantum-like portion that can be absorbed in its entirety by one person. There's usually enough to go round, and then some to spare."

"Can we ... drop the topic?" Mom suggests, looking significantly in Rachel's direction.

"She obviously knows more than you think she does," Pete remarks, looking at Rachel appraisingly. She scowls at him. She's lost track of who he is and what he did or didn't do, but she's pretty sure that he's the reason why Mom is looking so sick.

"Fine," Mom says, drawing herself up, tossing her head and looking marginally tougher again, "but that isn't what my mother meant. She doesn't blame me for dating you; she rather liked you. She blames me for being too stubborn to move out of that house after you crashed into it - and she's right about that. She and Julia both begged me to move somewhere else, leave the memories behind, start afresh, but _I_ had to prove to everyone that I wasn't going to allow you to chase me away, so I stayed. If I'd listened to them, we wouldn't have been in there when Hurricane Irene hit Princeton."

"That's right," Pete says cheerfully. "You'd have sold the house to some family with three kids who'd all be dead now, and you'd feel so much better for sacrificing _them_ instead of your daughter."

"If I'd sold it, maybe someone would have noticed ...,"

"Noticed what the construction engineers didn't see when they examined the house after the crash?" Pete mocks. "Don't be ridiculous! Feeling guilty about what happened to the kid isn't noble; it's narcissistic. It's based on the assumption that your little fart causes an earthquake in Chile. Next you'll be all, 'Oh, it's _so_ my fault that he crashed his car into my house!'" He says this in a high falsetto, but neither Mom nor Wilson smile. They stare at him in silence.

Pete stares back, the grin fading. He groans. "Oh, seriously! What convoluted logic makes you responsible for my insanities?"

"You just said yourself that I shouldn't have dated you!" Mom points out.

"Because you're responsible for _her_ ," he jerks his head in Rachel's direction, "not because you're in any way responsible for me. Oh, I get it; this is the ' _I should never have dumped him'_ guilt trip, right?"

"No, it's the _'I should never have dated a vulnerable guy who can't deal with a break-up'_ guilt trip," Wilson says with asperity, "and I think she may have a point there."

Pete straightens himself. "You know what I like about Christianity?" Mom and Wilson look as confounded as Rachel feels. She hasn't understood a thing these past ten minutes. "It's the idea of free agency, the notion that people make their own choices and can be called on them." He looms over them like a gnarled old tree. "I wasn't your marionette. Feel free to regret having dated me, but don't ever assume that either of you made any choices for me. _I_ drove my car into your house, _I_ nearly killed Wilson, _I_ nuked my hippocampus. Those may have been crappy choices, but they were all _mine_."

He pushes past Mom and Wilson to the door. From there he looks down at Rachel. "I'm - sorry about your legs, kid," he says.

Rachel has no idea what she's supposed to say; normally she's supposed to smile and say, "Oh, that's okay," when someone apologises, but she isn't sure whether Pete/House is apologising, and if so, then for what. Besides, she really, _really_ doesn't feel like saying that _anything_ is okay to this odd person. He's a sight worse than Nana, the way he talks to Mom. So she says, "I need the bathroom," instead.

That draws the faintest of smiles from Pete. He gives her a nod, and then he's out of the room and down the corridor. Mom and Wilson stare after him, and then Mom collapses on the bed, burying her face in her hands.

"What a god-awful day!" she moans. "What the hell was that?"

"I think," Wilson says cautiously, "that he just absolved you for dumping him."

"Wonderful - that makes my day!" Mom says in the voice she uses when she doesn't mean it. "Too bad I'm not a Catholic." She sits up and rolls her shoulders stiffly. "Did he just leave without saying goodbye?"

"Well - yes," Wilson says, placing a hand on her back.

"Great! He's going to England, I may never see him again, and he can't even say goodbye! What the ...!" And Mom says a word that Rachel and her classmates may never, never use. "Well, I guess I deserved that, but that doesn't make it any the more pleasant. I wish ...,"

But Rachel doesn't care anymore what Mom wishes. She wishes she had her stuffed rabbit, her bed, a long goodnight story and a very long cuddle with Mom, but for the moment she'll settle for less. "Mom, I _really_ need the bathroom. Badly."

On the way back home, while leafing through her book, she asks the question that's been bugging her for some time now. "Wilson, why'd you call Pete 'House'?"

She'd thought at first that maybe Wilson had got confused - he was in a brain rehab after all, and Mom says that people with brain problems are often confused - but Mom hadn't corrected him once when he'd called Pete 'House', nor had Pete.

Wilson, riding shotgun, squints over at Mom to see whether he may answer. Mom doesn't say anything; she just keeps looking straight ahead at the traffic, so Wilson ventures, "Because that's his last name - House."

"Is it, Mom?" Rachel asks doubtfully.

"Yes, honey, that's his last name," Mom says glancing at Rachel in the rear-view mirror. She interprets Rachel's expression correctly. "Why shouldn't it be?"

"Because he said it was something different when he came to our place the first time." She can't remember what he'd said he was called, but it hadn't been House. "He doesn't look like House." She doesn't really remember what House looked like, only that he'd reminded her of a pirate. Pete doesn't look like a pirate.

"She - remembers House?" Wilson asks Mom in a low voice. "After all this time?"

"I believe that my mother, with her semi-veiled attacks in my presence and constant diatribes about him in my absence, has done a lot to create pseudo-memories," Mom answers Wilson. Then she raises her voice so it carries better to the back. "He _is_ House; he looks different because he's older now and he shaves. He used to have a lot of stubble."

"So why'd he pretend not to be House?" She's certain about that; she remembers Mom walking in on her and Pete while he was quizzing her about House, pretending that he had no idea who House was. "And he didn't remember the pirate cartoon!" There, that's solid evidence! She's absolutely sure that she got the cartoon from him, although she has no idea from where she has that unshakeable conviction.

Maybe Pete is just pretending to be House to fool Mom and Wilson - like Barty Crouch pretending to be Professor Moody.

"He didn't remember me either," she adds. That isn't good evidence, as she knows. She's changed a lot, and lots of people who knew her as a baby don't recognise her, but most of them say things like, 'Oh my, Rachel, how you've grown! I'd never have recognised you!' Pete, however, had treated her like a stranger.

"It's complicated, honey," Mom says, which means that she isn't going to give Rachel an explanation.

Rachel pouts. It's always 'complicated' (Mom's favourite) or 'difficult to explain' (Julia's favourite) or 'not the sort of thing you need to know at your age' (that one is Nana's favourite).

Looking in the rear-view mirror again, Mom relents. "He's lost his memory, so when he was with us the first time he didn't remember he was House. And he didn't recognise any of us."

Okay, she knows all about that. It's like Gilderoy Lockhart's memory charm.

"How'd that happen?" she asks. "Did he have a sickness?" The things that happen by magic in the wizard world tend to be caused by sickness in the muggle world.

"No, he had an operation. He had two metal rods put in his head, and then an electric current - you know, the stuff that makes our lamps light - was sent through the rods into his brain. It erased his memories, like wiping chalk off a blackboard."

That sounds pretty much like an _obliviate_ charm, but she knows better than to say so aloud. That would just make Mom point out that magic doesn't exist (as though she didn't know that - she's not a baby!) and tonight, instead of reading a decent goodnight story, Mom would drag out one of the many books about the human body that she's bought for Rachel, with nasty pictures of eyeballs and muscles, and try to explain the brain to her. She considers asking why Pete had that operation, but thinks the better of it: once Mom gets started on medicine, she doesn't stop that easily. It's better not to set her off.

So she returns to her book, looking at the pictures of how they film Quidditch scenes in front of a green screen - which is sort of cheating, isn't it? She decides to strike the Barbie doll off her birthday wish list - Mom won't get her one anyway - and put a wand like Hermione's on it instead.

* * *

Wilson's latkes are better than Nana's. "Want another one?" he asks from his position at the stove. Rachel nods. She's glad he's come down from New York to visit them again, even if it's only for a day; his food is _so_ much better than what Mom cooks.

Mom returns with the mail. She tosses two envelopes into Rachel's lap. "Here, Christmas cards for you," she says. "Check who they're from, please."

That's so that if Rachel didn't send them a card, she can still do so, because apparently you have to send a Christmas card to everyone who sends one to you. Rachel sincerely hopes that she's written cards to the senders of these two, because Mom insists that she write a 'personal greeting' in every card, which makes writing them hard work. Not that Mom buys Christmas cards for Rachel to send; she gets ones that say 'Season's Greetings' because they're Jews. Rachel thinks it would make more sense for her to send Christmas cards to those of her friends who are Christians, and that they should send her the non-Christmassy Christmas cards, but Mom says that it would be asking too much of everyone to figure out what religion everyone else belonged to.

"This one's from Conrad," she says. She has no idea why Conrad sent her a card; they don't talk to each other unless they have to. "Do I _have_ to write him one? He's stupid, and if he tells the others about it everyone will say I'm in love with him!"

"No," Mom says absently. "I think this is the return one for the one I sent his parents. His dad works with me." She turns to Wilson. "Do you want to stay the weekend? We'd love to have you, so if you don't have to return tomorrow ..."

"I don't have to return till Monday, but aren't you going to your mother's place? It's Hanukkah, after all," Wilson says.

"Not this year," Mom answers. "We've decided to stay here and have some quiet family time together."

"Well, if you're sure," Wilson says. Then he frowns. "Quiet family time? I thought you were going to raise Rachel in the Spirit of Judaism." He sketches quotation marks.

"That was before the Spirit of Judaism in the form of my mother told me she'd call Social Services to get my daughter taken away from me."

"Wow! Did she _really_...?"

Mom shakes her head. "No, it was just an empty threat. But I'm fed up."

"So, why'd she want to call Social Services? Aren't you feeding Rachel kosher? Or is it the lack of a father figure, without whom she'll turn into a hardened criminal by the time she's twelve?"

Rachel wants to giggle, but since she caused the last epic fight between Mom and Nana, she keeps her head down low and opens the second card. The envelope is fat and when she tears it open, a brochure drops out along with the card. The card has a picture of a reindeer on it, with big round eyes. There's a string dangling from the card. She gives it an experimental tug, and the reindeer sticks out its tongue. It's funny.

As she pulls the string a few more times she half listens to Mom saying, "She figured out somehow that I'd been seeing House. We had a bit of a fight."

Rachel is glad Mom doesn't snitch on her. It was all her fault. Last weekend, when they were at Nana's place, she'd gone to Julia to ask about House, because she felt awkward asking Mom. Usually, Julia is pretty cool about everything. But when Julia heard that she'd met House, she'd called Rob, and then there'd been absolutely dreadful yelling and shouting; and Nana, hearing Mom and Julia and Rob, had come to join in. Even Rob, who never lost his temper, had been yelling at Mom.

_"The last time you had dealings with that maniac, he nearly turned my kids into orphans! Lisa, if you have the slightest bit of sense, you'll stay away from him. Otherwise, stay away from us!"_

Upon which Mom had grabbed her and packed her into the car.

All in all, she prefers not to think about last weekend, so she picks up the brochure instead. It looks boring; just some place with old houses and churches. On the inside, however, two pictures are circled with a thick red marker. The rooms in the pictures look vaguely familiar. She deciphers the captions:

_The Divinity School in the Bodleian, which was used as the Infirmary in the Harry Potter films.  
The Great Hall, Christ Church, which was replicated to create Hogwarts Hall._

"Cool!" she breathes. "Mom, can we go there?"

"Where, honey?" Mom asks, peering over.

She reads the caption on the brochure. "Oxford. It says they made the Harry Potter movies there."

"That's in England. It's too far away, I'm afraid. Anyway, I'm pretty sure they shot most of the scenes in a studio."

"Mo-om!"

"There's a Harry Potter theme park in Florida; maybe we can go there sometime."

'Maybe' and 'sometime' are not good words. They mean, 'not anytime soon'. Rachel scowls at her mother. " _You_ went to England this year. Threetimes!"

"That was for work," Mom says hastily.

"Three times?" Wilson says. " _Three_ times? I didn't know that. I'd like to have your job."

Mom blushes furiously. "Shut up, Wilson!" she says. She turns back to Rachel. "Who sent you that, anyway?"

Rachel opens the card. "Pete," she says after a moment.

Mom goes very still.

"Wilson's going," Rachel adds.

Mom holds out her hand for the card. "Gimme!" she orders. Rachel hands it over reluctantly. "' _Hey, Rachel_ ,'" Mom reads. " _I'm in England now, and I live close to the places where some of the Harry Potter stuff was filmed. Come on over when Wilson comes, and he can take you around. Pete'_."

"See?" Rachel says.

"What the hell is this?" Mom says to Wilson.

"Ummm, I have no idea. An invitation?" Wilson suggests.

"For whom and for what?" Mom snaps.

Wilson pinches his nose at the top, where it joins his face. "Well, it could be what it seems at face value, an invitation to Rachel to come and see the delights of Oxford."

"He doesn't live in Oxford."

"No, but it's a mere hour away from London," Wilson says. "Or, this being House, who is both obsessive and unpredictable, it could also be a covert invitation to _you_ to come and spend the rest of your life with him."

Mom snorts.

"But in all likelihood, he's just messing with your head," Wilson concludes.

"Probably," Mom agrees, rolling her eyes.

"What's that mean, 'messing with your head'?" Rachel asks.

"It means that he's having a joke at my expense," Mom explains tight-lipped.

Rachel can sense her visit Hogwarts, the _real_ Hogwarts, receding into the far, far future with every word that Mom and Wilson exchange. "No!" she says forcefully. Mom and Wilson stare at her. "No! He sent _me_ the card, not you. If he was joking with you, he'd have sent the card to you."

"Sweetie, he knew I'd read the card. That's how - how he does things. It's a game to him."

"No," Wilson says unexpectedly. "He doesn't involve children when he plays his head games."

"Excuse me!" Mom says. "You were the one who told me how he treated Rachel like a dog getting house training."

"He wasn't playing games then. He was _trying_ to act like a parent. Other parents prepare their kids for admission tests, so he was doing the same. It worked, didn't it?"

Propping her elbow on the table, Mom leans her forehead on the palm of her hand. "So why is he inviting Rachel?" she asks Wilson.

Wilson shrugs. "Atonement?" he ventures. "He blames himself, you know."

"He doesn't _believe_ in atonement. He believes that you have to live with the crap you caused. He considers apologies or deeds of atonement an easy way out."

Mom and Wilson are going to keep on talking, discussing this thing, instead of getting everything ready for going to England, so Rachel interrupts. "Why don't we go over there, and then ask him why he invited me?" That makes so much more sense than sitting here wasting time trying to figure out why Pete wants her to come to England. Who cares, anyway?

Mom taps a rhythm on the table with her fingers. Then she looks at Wilson. "Are _you_ going there?"

"Actually - yes. He invited me to come and see him, and I have a week off at Christmas."

Mom raises her eyebrows. "What does Nolan say? I thought he considered you two toxic to each other."

Wilson spreads his palms out. "Nolan says that like any prescription drug, what is beneficial when administered as prescribed, can be lethal when overdosed."

"Christmas," Mom murmurs. "That's kinda short notice."

"Is that your only objection?" Wilson asks.

"No, I have about twenty others!" Mom snaps. "This man is driving me crazy. He dumps me - twice! - , won't talk to me for weeks, and then, out of the blue, he invites me to visit him."

Rachel can't let that stand. "He invited _me_ , not you."

"Even better!" Mom says morosely. "He invites my daughter while ignoring me completely."

"Last time he handled it the other way round - courting you while ignoring your daughter. Didn't work too well, so I guess he's learned from his mistakes."

"Which he can't remember." She traces patterns on the card with one finger, her tongue poking out of the corner of her mouth. Then she discovers the string and pulls it, frowning when the reindeer's tongue lollops out. "He's so immature!" she says.

Rachel doesn't know what that means, but it doesn't sound like a compliment. She figures she'd better rise to Pete's defence if she wants to go to England. "I think it's funny," she says defensively.

"Well, if he's managed to cater to _your_ taste, that's okay then, isn't it?" Mom says. A moment later she shakes her head, laughing shakily. "God, that could have come from my mother! I'm sorry, Rachel. Of course it's cool, and it's nice of him to send you a card you like. I was just ... grouchy because he out-manoeuvred me."

"What does that mean?"

"'Caught me by surprise, did something I didn't expect.' What the hell do I do?" she asks no one in particular.

"I can go with Wilson, and you can stay here. Then you don't have to do anything," Rachel offers in the way of a compromise.

Wilson doesn't look enthusiastic, but Mom looks amused. "Then Nana will definitely set Social Services on me." She tips her head at Wilson. "Why aren't you telling me to stay away from him? You think _I'm_ toxic for him."

Wilson sits down too, props his elbows on the table and interlaces his fingers. "I'm just accepting the inevitable, cultivating my inner Zen. _You_ ," he unlaces one finger to point it at her, "intended to go from the start, otherwise you'd have taken the card and thrown it straight in the trash."

They play at staring till the first person blinks until Mom lowers her gaze. "What do you think?" she asks Wilson. "Is he - serious about this?"

"What do you mean by 'this'?" Wilson asks in turn. Mom doesn't answer; she plucks her lip. "Look, I have no more idea than you do what he means by sending Rachel the card, but I don't think he means to hurt you. He says he's in therapy in England. Voluntarily."

"So'm I," Mom mutters. "It's not the miracle cure it's made out to be."

"It's big - for him."

Mom mumbles something unintelligible as she gets up and stomps out of the kitchen. Rachel and Wilson stare after her in silence.

A moment later there's the pling of Mom's computer booting, and then Mom calls from the living room, "Wilson, when's your flight?"

Wilson grins at Rachel and raises his right hand for Rachel to high-five him. The boys in her class do that sometimes; normally she thinks it's ridiculous, but on this occasion it's the right thing to do. Wilson calls to Mom, "It's a British Airways flight on the twenty-third around eight p.m. from La Guardia."

"And the return flight?"

"Hang on!" Wilson gets out his Smartphone and scrolls around in it.

The return flight isn't _that_ important, Rachel decides. Mom always says one needs to 'set priorities'. "Wilson?" she says.

"Hmmm?"

"I think your latkes are burning."

**The End**


End file.
